(Vladimir Nabokov)

• Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. (pg. 9)
• But that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honeydew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since - until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another. (pg. 15)
• 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 car. (pg. 15)
• The word "forever" referred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood. The Lolita whose iliac crests had not yet flared, the Lolita that today I could touch and smell and hear and see, the Lolita of the strident voice and the rich brown hair - of the bangs and the swirls at the sides and the curls at the back, and the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar vocabulary - "revolting," "super," "lucious," "goon," "drip" - that Lolita, my Lolita... (pg. 65)
• I felt instinctively that toilets - as also telephones - happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch. 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 special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; here shall Jane's heart always break. (pg. 211)
• It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight. (pg. 270)
• I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. (pg. 277)
• "You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own"... (pg. 284)