Everything was too quiet to be natural. It seemed as if the silence was rising, rising — would suddenly brim over and break into laughter. - Vladimir Nabokov

-Why do you live in hotels?

-It simplifies postal matters, it eliminates the nuisance of private ownership, it confirms me in my favorite habit — the habit of freedom.

...that swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born...

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.