Fame in our day is too common to be confused with the enduring glow around the deserving book. - 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.

Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.

Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.