Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

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Awe and exhiliration — along with heartbreak and mordant wit — abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a... read more

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Humbert Humbert arrives in the USA to become a school teacher. He will be living with Charlotte Haze, the mother of 12 year old Dolores Haze (Lola, or Lolita, to Humbert). Humbert Humbert falls in love with the girl and decides to marry her mother in order to be close to her. After the sudden... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

Characters/People edit see section history

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Lolita (aka Dolores Haze): 12-year old objection of affection and obsession of Humbert Humbert.
Humbert Humbert: The sheep in wolf's clothing in every way. He is a highly educated, glamarously sophistacted, and devastingly handsome man who also happens to be, in all honesty, a pedophile with a thing for young girls. He has a rather dry sense of humor that makes his view of the world hilarious even while shocking. Despite his twisted nature, he's a rather sympathetic character, one who fascinates you all the while.
Clare Quilty: American playwright and child pornographer, whom Lolita is a fan of
Annabel Leigh: Humbert Humbert's childhood love
Valeria Humbert: Humbert Humbert's first wife
Charlotte Haze: Lolita's mother
Dick: Dolores Haze's husband
Dolly Schiller: Add a description of this character.
Rita: A friend of Humbert's
Mona: One of Lolita's best school friends.
Jean: I couldn't read the whole thing. INCREDIBLE writer, but reading an old man give details about what he wants to do to a 13 year old is too much for me.
Louise: The Hazes' maid
Lolita: The object of Humbert's desires!
Mary: Lolita's mother.
Gaston
Monique
Brice
Trapp: Humbert's cousin that he thinks looks similar to a guy who is following Lolita and who is later on becomes her lover and kidnapper.
Marion
Phyllis
Charlie: The son of the manager of Camp Q
Barbara
Bill
Diana
Carmen: One of Humbert's many names for Lolita
Leslie
Tony
Harold Haze: Lolita's late father

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Quotes edit see section history

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
Narrator
“Sometimes, while Lolita would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine pride - and literally crawl on my knees to your chair, my Lolita! You would give me one look - a gray furry question mark of a look: "Oh no, not again" (incredulity, exasperation); for you never deigned to believe that I could, without any specific designs, ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling! The fragility of those bare arms of yours - how I longed to enfold them, all your four limpid lovely limbs, a folded colt, and take your head between my unworthy hands, and pull the temple-skin back on both sides, and kiss your chinesed eyes, and - "Pulease, leave me alone, will you," you would say, "for Christ's sake leave me alone." And I would get up from the floor while you looked on, your face deliberately twitching in imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am only a brute, never mind, let us go on with my miserable story.”
“...and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her gooseflesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D. - and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything else I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.”
“Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book.But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge or art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”
“In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket...At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”
Humbert Humbert
“Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care. My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.”
Humbert Humbert
“The moral sense in mortals is the dutyWe have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.”
“I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one.”
Humbert Humbert
“Oh, don’t cry, I’m so sorry I cheated so much, but that’s the way things are.”
Lolita
“Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.”
Humbert Humbert
“"Al principio, Annabel y yo hablábamos de temas periféricos. Ella recogía puñados de fina arena y la dejaba escurrirse entre sus dedos."”
“There are two kinds of visual memory: one where you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other whe you instantly evoke, with eyes shut, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little host in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).”

Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
Highlighted by 96 Kindle customers
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
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Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”
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There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: “honey-colored skin,” “thin arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).
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A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
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All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly,
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But that mimosa grove—the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honeydew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since—until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.
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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.
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I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); teasing them with fake “primal scenes”; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one’s real sexual predicament.
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