“...memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”

“Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”

“Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita.”

“A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”

“anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past”

“Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.”

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