Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.

Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk.

Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?

And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.

I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. ... I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.