Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can s… - Vladimir Nabokov

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.

"No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of "little girls" — not simply "young girls." Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and "sex kittens." Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his "aging mistress.

This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends ’ and ‘schools ’ and ‘myths ’ and ‘symbols ’ and ‘social comment ’ and something unspeakably spooky called ‘climate of thought.’ Actually these ‘serious’ courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books.