Lolita
Important Quotations Explained
1. “Lolita” should make all of us—parents,
social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance
and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.
2. In a nervous and slender-leaved
mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the
ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees
we could see arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by
the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing
cards—presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy.
3. We had been everywhere. We had
really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our
long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the
lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country, that, by then, in retrospect,
was no more than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books,
old tires and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the
moment I feigned sleep.
4. “Do you really want to know who
it was? Well, it was—”
And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows
and puckering her parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat
fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle that name
that the astute reader had guessed long ago.
“Waterproof.”
5. Unless it can be proven to me—to
me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that,
in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American
girl child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood
by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, life is a
joke) I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy
and very local palliative of articulate art.
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