nisengwe's notes

Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)

Regis Nisengwe -

Quotes from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov:

  • Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
  • Words without experience are meaningless.
  • 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.
  • We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
  • I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
  • The days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation can.
  • When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
  • Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality - the deception was bearable.