And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.

do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.

The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.

I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

My Lolita remarked: "You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions.

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.