To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.

The tiny madman in his padded cell.

Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.

Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.