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24fe16b
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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.
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life
lolita
nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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67b9bec
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There was no Lo to behold.
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lolita
wordplay
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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aae83bd
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My little cup brims with tiddles.
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lolita
vladimir-nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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21a1e5f
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I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me.
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girl
lolita
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e18ebfc
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"..."offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual"..." --
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lolita
vladimir-nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9d850b7
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I could not kill , of course, as some have thought. You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
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lolita
love
love-at-first-sight
love-at-last-sight
love-you-forever
vladimir-nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ec30d6b
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"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."
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lolita
lollipop
pronunciation
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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07ba34a
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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.
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lolita
love
obsession
obsessive-love
passion
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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bc68842
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"Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. The affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabiness of the subject matter. This is why we love "Madame Bovary" and cry for Emma, why we greedily read "Lolita" as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine."
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lolita
reading
reading-thinking
tehran
tragedylolita-in-tehran
why-we-love-reading
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Azar Nafisi |
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d955bc1
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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.
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lolita
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ab54b43
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And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy
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lolita
love
lovers
nymph
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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25b9e3e
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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.
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lolita
nabokov
wilderness
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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daeaf6a
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Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom.
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doomed
foreshadowing
lolita
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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16a4ba7
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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.
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lolita
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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59df8c7
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Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand), the first single from Eat Me, Drink Me, features a video filmed by Titanic director James Cameron. In it, Manson croons to Wood, who - with bobbed hair, gloves and a demure frock - blankly masturbates in an audience of writhing lesbians, Manson's image reflected in her heart-shaped glasses. I wanted to like the song, but found Manson's threadbare voice and overdubbed music annoying, and the chorus - 'Don't break my heart/and I won't break your heart-shaped glasses' - suggested a pugilistic retribution ('Dump me, and I'll punch your lights out!') more in keeping with Norman Mailer than Nabokov.
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evan-rachel-wood
heart-shaped-glasses
james-cameron
lolita
marilyn-manson
music-videos
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Antonella Gambotto-Burke |
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0ee66d1
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I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them.
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emma-bovary
expectations
fate
friends
gustave-flaubert
king-lear
literary-references
literature
lolita
madame-bovary
shakespeare
vladimir-nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f70880b
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Leave your incidental Dick.
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innuendo
lolita
wordplay
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9d4262d
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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.
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lolita
proposal
sad
vladimir-nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov |