Lolita

by Vladimir Nabokov

fire of my loins.

respectively.

(picnic, lightning)

She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious.

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,” “think arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark inner side 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).

(born Vanessa van Ness).

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

Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up.

All of which goes to show how dreadfully stupid poor Humbert always was in matters of sex.

(Maximovich! his name suddenly taxies back to

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

Everything between the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false rudiments of joy. Everything they shared made one of them.

All I know is that while the Haze woman and I went down the steps into the breathless garden, my knees were like reflections of knees in rippling water, and my lips were like sand, and– “That was my Lo,” she said, “and these are my lilies.” “Yes,” I said, “yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.”

Why does the way she walks–a child, mind you, a mere child!–excite me so abominably? Analyze it.

Never have I experienced such agony. I would like to describe her face, her ways–and I cannot, because my own desire for her blinds me when she is near.

Her little doves seem well formed already. Precocious pet!

We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.

The house was still Lo-less

My first movement was one of repulsion and retreat. My second was like a friend's calm hand falling upon my shoulder and bidding me take my time.

(Lolita, with an incestuous thrill, I had grown to regard as my child),

Simple, was it not? But what d'ye know, folks–I just could not make myself do it!

We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill. Oh, my poor Charlotte, do not hate me in your eternal heaven among an eternal alchemy of asphalt and rubber and metal and stone–but thank God, not water, not water!