“All three of them stood for a moment gazing at the stars.''And all these are worlds,'' said Hagen.''Or else,'' said Clements with a yawn, ''a frightful mess. I suspect it is really a fluorescent corpse, and we are inside it.”

“My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes) "we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed." "... Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying here." "There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita.”

“All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.”

“I got out of the car and slammed its door. How matter-of-fact, how square that slam sounded in the void of the sunless day! Woof, commented the dog perfunctorily. I pressed the bell button, it vibrated through my whole system. Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne. From what depth this re-nonsense? Woof, said the dog. A rush and a shuffle, and woosh-woosh went the door.Couple of inches taller. Pink-rimmed glasses. New, heaped-up hairdo, new ears. How simple! The moment, the death that I had kept conjuring up for three years was as simple as a bit of dry wood. She was frankly and hugely pregnant. Her head looked smaller (only two seconds had passed really, but let me give them as much wooden duration as life can stand), and her pale-freckled cheeks were hollowed, and her bare shins and arms had lost all their tan, so that the little hairs showed. She wore a brown, sleeveless felt dress and sloppy felt slippers.'We-e-ell!' she exhaled after a pause with all the emphasis of wonder and welcome.'Husband at home?' I croaked, fist in pocket.I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”

“There is nothing so banal in the world,' said Ada 'than pitching stones at a hawfinch.”

“We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.”

“I really knew nothing about her, blinded as I was by that burning loveliness which replaces everything else and justifies everything”