Great Throughts Treasury

"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 can."

"The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense."

"The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates."

"The further I get from the things that I care about, the less I care about how much further away I get."

"The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison."

"The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book."

"The gentle and vague regions in which I moved assets were poets, not the land of crime"

"The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity."

"The Girl Scout’s motto is also mine. I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such as — well, never mind what. My duty is —to be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I am cheerful. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word, and deed."

"The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."

"The lost glove is happy."

"The locomotive, working rapidly with its elbows, hurried through a pine forest, then—with relief—among fields."

"The growth of his power and fame was matched, in my imagination, by the degree of the punishment I would have liked to inflict on him. Thus, at first, I would have been content with an electoral defeat, a cooling of public enthusiasm. Later I already required his imprisonment; still later, his exile to some distant, flat island with a single palm tree, which, like a black asterisk, refers one to the bottom of an eternal hell made of solitude, disgrace, and helplessness. Now, at last, nothing but his death could satisfy me."

"The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind."

"The great fraternity of C-minus, backbone of the nation, steadily scribbling on."

"The novel is not "a crazy quilt of bits"; it is a logical sequence of psychological events: the movements of stars may seem crazy to the simpleton, but wise men know the comets come back."

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible."

"The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is."

"The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries."

"The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading"

"The power of resistance is to set an example: not necessarily to change the person with whom you disagree, but to empower the one who is watching and whose growth is not yet completed, whose path is not at all clear, whose direction is still very much up in the proverbial air."

"The problem lies not with the characters within the novel, but with the reader itself."

"The quality of this novel is the way the plot is treated and not the plot itself."

"The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future."

"The reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night ... is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion."

"The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser."

"The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as we'll disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong site of the road."

"The sense of literary creation is to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade."

"The sky was so heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes -- telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression -- that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude."

"The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free."

"The shock of her death froze something in me. The child I loved, was gone, but I kept looking for her - long after I had left my own childhood behind. The poison was in the wound, you see. And the wound wouldn't heal."

"The smooth sizzle of a passing motorcar."

"The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy."

"The square root of I is I."

"The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning."

"The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon."

"The term "bend sinister" means a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy). This choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world. The title's drawback is that a solemn reader looking for "general ideas" or "human interest" (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one."

"The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before."

"The time, the place, the torture. Her fan, her gloves, her mask. I spent that night and many others getting it out of her bit by bit, but not getting it all. I was under the strange delusion that first I must find out every detail, reconstruct every minute, and only then decide whether I could bear it. But the limit of desired knowledge was unattainable, nor could I ever foretell the approximate point after which I might imagine myself satiated, because of course the denominator of every fraction of knowledge was potentially as infinite as the number of intervals between the fractions themselves."

"The tiny madman in his padded cell."

"The two lads were told to wash their hands. The recent thrill of adventure had been superseded by another sort of excitement. They locked themselves up. The tap ran unheeded. Both were in a manly state and moaning like doves."

"The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them."

"The train was now going fast. Franz suddenly clutched his side, transfixed by the thought that he had lost his wallet which contained so much."

"The wedding was a quiet affair, and when called upon to enjoy my promotion from lodger to lover did I experience only bitterness and distaste? No."

"Then slid up my arms that were waiting, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her ??tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent eyes of twilight-neither more nor less than the most of the cheap whores. Nymphets. Why imitate them-while between the complaining we die"

"Then the anguish increased to unendurable massivity and nightmare dimensions, making her scream and vomit. She wanted...to have her dark curls shaved to an aquamarine prickle, because they grew into her porous skull and curled inside. Jigsaw pieces of sky or wall came apart, no matter how delicately put together, but a careless jolt or a nurses elbow can disturb so easily those lightweight fragments which became incomprehensible blancs of anonymous objects, or the blank backs of Scrabble counters, which she could not turn over sunny side up, because her hands had been tied by a male nurse with Demons black eyes."

"Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth."

"Then, after all the excitement, I shall experience a certain satiation of suffering--perhaps on the mountain pass to a kind of happiness which it is too early for me to know (I know only that when I reach it, it will be with pen in hand)."

"There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion."

"There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction...For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy is the norm."