“Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!”

“I also know that the shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus!”

“It's because...you see, if we had souls, which we haven't, and if our souls met--yours and mine--they'd fight to the death. But after they had torn each other to pieces, to the very bottom, they'd see that they had the same root.”

“I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.”

“That night at Dumbarton was a classic of its kind. She had hopes still, I think, of enslaving me despite myself with her charms. And I probably thought the same. We both found we were mistaken. It had its moments; but she has the mind and morals of a jungle cat. She didn’t enjoy meeting … another of the same.”

“She was like me in lineaments-- her eyesHer hair, her features, all, to the very toneEven of her voice, they said were like to mine;But soften'd all, and temper'd into beauty;She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mindTo comprehend the universe: nor theseAlone, but with them gentler powers than mine,Pity, and smiles, and tears-- which I had not;And tenderness-- but that I had for her; Humility-- and that I never had. Her faults were mine-- her virtues were her own--I loved her, and destroy'd her!”