Vladimir Nabokov Lolita Quotes & Sayings

I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t'aimais, je t'aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller. — Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita: Oh my Carmen, my little Carmen ...
Humbert: Charmin' Carmen. Started garglin'
Lolita: I remember those sultry nights
Humbert: Those pre-raphaelites
Lolita: No, come on. And the stars and the cars and the bars and the barmen.
Humbert: And the bars that sparkled and the cars that parkled ... And the curs that barkled and the birds that larkled.
Lolita: And oh my charmin, our dreadful fights
Humbert: Such dreadful blights
Lolita: And the something town where arm in ... arm, we went, and our final row, and the gun I killed you with, o my Carmen ... the gun I am holding now — Vladimir Nabokov

Good by-aye! she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this. — Vladimir Nabokov

What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic - one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord. — Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer. — Vladimir Nabokov

They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kissed on the trim turf of old-world mountainsides, on the innerspring moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks, and in so many cabanes in so so many beech forests. But in the Wilds of America the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart's buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of potential snakes
que dis-je,of semi-extinct dragons!
while the crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to gartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike. — Vladimir Nabokov

In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee:
"Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight."
It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability - a most singular case, I presume - of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest. — Vladimir Nabokov

Suddenly, as Avis clung to her father's neck and ear while, with a casual arm, the man enveloped his lumpy and large offspring, I saw Lolita's smile lose all its light and become a frozen little shadow of itself, and the fruit knife slipped off the table and struck her with its silver handle a freak blow on the ankle which made her gasp, and crouch head forward, and then, jumping on one leg, her face awful with the preparatory grimace which children hold till the tears gush, she was gone - to be followed at once and consoled in the kitchen by Avis who had such a wonderful fat pink dad and a small chubby brother, and a brand-new baby sister, and a home, and two grinning dogs, and Lolita had nothing. — Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita should make all of us - parents, social workers, educators - apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world. — Vladimir Nabokov

"offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual" ... — Vladimir Nabokov

I have always had a number of parts lined up in case the muse failed. A lepidopterist exploring famous jungles came first, then there was the chess grand master, then the tennis ace with an unreturnable service, then the goalie saving a historic shot, and finally, finally, the author of a pile of unknown writings- Pale Fire, Lolita, Ada- which my heirs discover and publish. — Vladimir Nabokov

I would see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, to a glittering summit where laughing athletes stripped to the waist were waiting for her, for her. — Vladimir Nabokov

And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy — Vladimir Nabokov

As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage. — Vladimir Nabokov

I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face. — Vladimir Nabokov

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. — Vladimir Nabokov

My heart seemed everywhere at once. — Vladimir Nabokov

I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings. — Vladimir Nabokov

One last word,' I said in my horrible careful English, 'are you quite, quite sure that - well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but - well - some day, any day, you will not come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope'
'No,' she said smiling, 'no.'
'It would have made all the difference,' said Humbert Humbert.
Then I pulled out my automatic-I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it. — Vladimir Nabokov

I'm thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art, And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita. — Vladimir Nabokov

The Girl Scout's motto is also mine. I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such as - well, never mind what. My duty is - to be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I am cheerful. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word, and deed. — Vladimir Nabokov

For some reason, I kept seeing it - it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina - a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, "pinging" pebbles at an empty can. — Vladimir Nabokov

Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me -to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction- that in the infinitue run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child names Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet:
The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty. — Vladimir Nabokov

I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls ... There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl. — Vladimir Nabokov

You talk like a book. — Vladimir Nabokov

With your little claws, Lolita. — Vladimir Nabokov

And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski; some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
'You know what's so dreadful about dying is that you're 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 ... — Vladimir Nabokov

I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate's way - even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications. — Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name. — Vladimir Nabokov

Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus! — Vladimir Nabokov

Dying, dying, Lolita Haze,
Of hate and remorse I'm dying.
And again my hairy fist I raise,
And again I hear you crying. — Vladimir Nabokov

The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and the bars, and the barmen, were presently taken over by her — Vladimir Nabokov

My little cup brims with tiddles. — Vladimir Nabokov

She had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple. — Vladimir Nabokov

I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze
I cannot get out, said the starling — Vladimir Nabokov

Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom. — Vladimir Nabokov

Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me. — Vladimir Nabokov

Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up. — Vladimir Nabokov

No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conductive to attractiveness.
He is ponderously capricious.
Many of his casual opinions on people and scenery of this country are ludicrous.
A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning.
He is abnormal.
He is not a gentleman.
But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring it's author! — Vladimir Nabokov

For did it not mean I was losing my darling, just when I had secretly made her mine? — Vladimir Nabokov

My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys. — Vladimir Nabokov

It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed. — Vladimir Nabokov

The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy. — Vladimir Nabokov

This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My Calender is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don't think I can go on. Heart, head
everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat til page is full, printer. — Vladimir Nabokov

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. — Vladimir Nabokov

I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me. — Vladimir Nabokov

We all have such fateful objects
it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another
carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break. — Vladimir Nabokov

A moment later I heard my sweetheart running up the stairs. My heart expanded with such force that it almost blotted me out. I hitched up the pants of my pajamas, flung the door open: and simultaneously Lolita arrived, in her Sunday frock, stamping, panting, and the she was in my arms, her innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws, my palpitating darling! — Vladimir Nabokov

But in my arms she was always Lolita. — Vladimir Nabokov

Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with! — Vladimir Nabokov

And the most poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the chorus. — Vladimir Nabokov

Humbert Humbert: You know, I've missed you terribly.
Lolita Haze: I haven't missed you. In fact, I've been revoltingly unfaithful to you.
Humbert Humbert: Oh?
Lolita Haze: But it doesn't matter a bit, because you've stopped caring anyway.
Humbert Humbert: What makes you say I've stopped caring for you?
Lolita Haze: Well, you haven't even kissed me yet, have you? — Vladimir Nabokov

There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction ... For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. — Vladimir Nabokov

I appealed to her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair. — Vladimir Nabokov

Actually she was at least in her late twenties (I never established her exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods. — Vladimir Nabokov

My mouth to him was a splendid cave full of priceless treasures, but I denied him entrance. — Vladimir Nabokov

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann. — Vladimir Nabokov

Oh, Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties? — Vladimir Nabokov

There was no Lo to behold. — Vladimir Nabokov

I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else. — Vladimir Nabokov

My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip. — Vladimir Nabokov

Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita). — Vladimir Nabokov

Unattached details take all the sparkle out of your conversation. — Vladimir Nabokov

My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes) "we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed." " ... Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying here." "There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita. — Vladimir Nabokov

No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of "little girls" - not simply "young girls." Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and "sex kittens." Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his "aging mistress. — Vladimir Nabokov

Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita. — Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. — Vladimir Nabokov

Because you took advantage of my disadvantage. — Vladimir Nabokov

My own ultraviolet darling. " Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov

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

For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is "L". The suffix "-ita" has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy "L" and a long "o". No, the first syllable should be as in "lollipop", the "L" liquid and delicate, the "lee" not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in "Dolores." My little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname "Haze," where Irish mists blend with a German bunny - I mean, a small German hare. — Vladimir Nabokov

While you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away. — Vladimir Nabokov

I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel. — Vladimir Nabokov

I also know that the shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus! — Vladimir Nabokov

Leave your incidental Dick. — Vladimir Nabokov