The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.

Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.

He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.

But in my arms she was always Lolita.

One is always at home in one's past.