Quotes About Lolita

Nabokov changed my life," Max said. "I was going to be a writer, and then I read Lolita and I decided to go to law school instead. It looked easier.

Gary Kemp: 'True' was written about Clare Grogan. She was the inspiration, and she also gave me a copy of Nabokov's Lolita, and I used a couple of lines out of it for the song – 'seaside arms'.

I often reread passages of Lolita for its exquisite language. To me, Lolita has no message, no purpose, other than to exist as a marvel of literary creation. It has wit, intelligence and style. It pointedly makes no attempt to serve a higher moral purpose, and previous attempts by critics to find one have proven ludicrous. The annotated edition is accompanied by a brilliant afterword by Nabokov that is a lucid reminder of the pure joy of writing, its interplay with life.

The Boston run of 'Lolita, My Love' ended after a mere nine performances - though one of them was recorded at decent enough quality to be preserved by the New York Public Library.

In class, we were discussing the concept of the villain in the novel. I had mentioned that Humbert was a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people. He had created the Lolita he desired, and would not budge from that image.

The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another.

Because her name is not Lolita; her real name is Dolores, which as you know in Latin means `dolor.' So her real name is associated with sorrow and with anguish and with innocence. While Lolita becomes a sort of lightheaded, seductive and airy name, the Lolita of our novel is both of these at the same time. And in our culture here today, we only associate it with one aspect of that little girl, and the crassest interpretation of her.

What I had madly possessed," he informs us, "was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita . . . having no will, no consciousness—indeed no real life of her own.

At some point, the truth of Iran's past became as immaterial to those who appropriated it as the truth of Lolita's is to Humbert. It became immaterial in the same way that Lolita's truth, her desires and life, must lose color before Humbert's one obsession, his desire to turn a twelve-year-old unruly child into his mistress.

This is how I read Lolita. Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class, our discussions were colored by my students' hidden personal sorrows and joys. Like tearstains on a letter, these forays into the hidden and the personal shaded all our discussions of Nabokov. And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer.

Yet in fact he fails on both fronts. In the case of Lolita, he never succeeds in possessing her willingly, so that every act of lovemaking from then on becomes a crueler and more tainted act of rape; she evades him at every turn. And he fails to completely seduce the reader, or some readers at least. Again ironically, his ability as a poet, his own fancy prose style, exposes him for what he is.

Nabokov began writing 'Lolita' before he ever knew of Florence 'Sally' Horner, an 11-year-old who was kidnapped from Camden, New Jersey, in the summer of 1948.

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).

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.

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.

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

even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.

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

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

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a "young girl," and then, into a "college girl"—that horror of horrors.

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet. Age: five thousand three hundred days. Profession: none, or starlet. Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze? Why are you hiding, darling? (I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze, I cannot get out, said the starling).

Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita.

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?

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.