Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov You have 14 highlighted passages You have 1 note Last annotated on November 4, 2011 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).Read more at location 159 Add a note the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world ofRead more at location 244 Add a note they had taken my English toilet water; they had not; butRead more at location 455 Note: Toilet foreign urine Edit The passion I had developed for that nymphetfor the first nymphet in my life that could be reached at last by my awkward, aching, timid clawswould have certainly landed me again in a sanatorium, had not the devil realized that I was to be granted some relief if he wanted to have me as a plaything for some time longer.Read more at location 875 Add a note I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, impartial sympathy. So let us get started. I have a difficult job before me.Read more at location 897 Add a note Suspended on the brink of that voluptuous abyss (a nicety of physiologicalRead more at location 950 Add a note happy hand crept up her sunny leg as far as the shadow of decency allowed.Read more at location 952 Add a note vision of new delights filled me was not horrible but pathetic. I qualify it as pathetic. Patheticbecause despite the insatiable fire of my venereal appetite, I intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old child.Read more at location 986 Add a note The whole point is that the old link between the adult world and the child world has been completely severed nowadays by new customs and new laws. Despite my having dabbled in psychiatry and social work, I really knew very little about children.Read more at location 2062

Add a note Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; lets even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.Read more at location 2148 Add a note living in a brand new, mad new dream world, where everything was permissible, came over me as I realized what she was suggesting. I answered I did not know what game she and Charlie hadRead more at location 2212 Add a note love. The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. Why?Read more at location 2243 Add a note You chump, she said, sweetly smiling at me. You revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what youve done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old man.Read more at location 2344 Add a note My chre Dolors! I want to protect you, dear, from all the horrors that happen to little girls in coal sheds and alley ways, and, alas, comme vous le savez trop bien, ma gentille, in the blueberry woods during the bluest of summers. Through thick and thin I will still stay your guardian, and if you are good, I hope a court may legalize that guardianship before long. Let us, however, forget, Dolores Haze, so-called legal terminology, terminology that accepts as rational the term lewd and lascivious cohabitation. I am not a criminal sexual psychopath taking indecent liberties with a child.Read more at location 2444 Add a note Now, in perusing what follows, the reader should bear in mind not only the general circuit as adumbrated above, with its many sidetrips and tourist traps, secondary circles and skittish deviations, but also the fact that far from being an indolent partie de plaisir, our tour was a hard, twisted, teleological growth, whose sole raison dtre (these French clichs are symptomatic) was to keep my companion in passable humor from kiss to kiss.Read more at location 2520 Add a note