“I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.”

“Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me -to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction- that in the infinitue run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child names Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet: The moral sense in mortals is the dutyWe have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.”

“Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”

“Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.”

“In truth, I wanted her to read my mind so I didn't have to stoop to the womanly art of articulation.”

“He who has seen the misery of man only has seen nothing, he must see the misery of woman; he who has seen the misery of woman only has seen nothing, he must see the misery of childhood.”