Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov
Page 5: God, I forgot how brilliant this foreword is, equally if information technology'due south a existent medical foreword just it's really Nabokov's creation too.
Page 6: "The caretakers of the diverse cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk." —> I love this. Let them all rest peacefully.
Page 7: "that had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summertime of 1947, to a competent psychopathologist, in that location would take been no disaster; simply so, neither would there have been this book." —> Only go men into therapy, though. I love this book, merely in real life, fuck the book.
Page 7: "A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a admirer. Just how magically his singing violin tin conjure up a tendresse, a pity for Lolita that makes united states of america entranced with the volume while abhorring its writer!" —> Yes exactly.
Page vii: "and notwithstanding more of import to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the upstanding impact the book should have on the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study in that location lurks a general lesson; the wayward kid, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac—these are non only brilliant characters in a unique story; they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils." —> Nabokov knew. He knew what he was doing and how his book would be received. Of form he had to set it upwardly this mode in the beginning.
Page 11: "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." —> I think this is then clever besides.
Page xi: "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style." —> It occurs to me that people reading this book for the first fourth dimension might recall that Humber killed Lolita, and that'due south where the murderer reference comes from. I don't remember what my first impression was upon hearing that Humbert was a murderer or that he was on trial, but it's definitely a reasonable suspicion to come to.
Page 12: "My very photogenic mother died in a freak blow (picnic, lightning)" —> I honey the succinctness of this too.
Page 13-14: "There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an prototype in the laboratory of your heed, with your eyes open up (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: 'dear-colored skin,' 'thin artillery,' 'brownish bobbed hair,' 'long lashes,' 'big bright mouth'); and the other when y'all instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, admittedly optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita)." —> This is interesting. How you tin recall full general details about some person or event, just others are imprinted on you fully whenever yous close your eyes.
Page fifteen: "I was on my knees, and on the signal of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu." —> Lol Jesus.
Page 15-16: "When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past." —> This besides describes anxiety and other mental illnesses.
Page 16-17: "while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to concord in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion." —> Welp.
Folio 17: Uranist: a homosexual. This explains a lot about Humbert, that he says he sabbatum with uranists while at college.
Page 18: "It volition be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones." —> Here he goes, on that obsession with time.
Page xix: "Y'all accept to exist an creative person and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a chimera of hot poisonous substance in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hibernate!), in order to discern at one time, past 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 fiddling deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power." —> This is then fucked up.
Folio nineteen: "Furthermore, since the thought of time plays such a magic part in the matter, the student should not exist surprised to learn that there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, and as many as 90 in a few known cases, between maiden and man to enable the latter to come nether a nymphet's spell." —> Ew.
Folio 19: "When I was a child and she was a child, my piddling Annabel was no nymphet to me" —> I'm living for these Edgar Allan Poe references, though. I knew Annabel was i, and Nabokov was originally going to call this book The Kingdom past the Body of water. Merely there have been a lot more than Annabel Lee references than I remembered.
Page 20: "This is all very interesting, and I daresay y'all see me already frothing at the mouth in a fit; but no, I am non; I am just winking happy thoughts into a fiddling tiddle loving cup." —> Uhhh.
Folio 21: "Humbert Humbert tried hard to exist good. Actually and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and nether no circumstances would take interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row. But how his middle trounce when, among the innocent throng, he espied a demon kid, 'enfant charmante et fourbe,' dim eyes, bright lips, ten years in jail if you only prove her you are looking at her. So life went." —> This is the part that gets misinterpreted constantly about this book. They are all still children. At that place are no demons, no seductresses. It's all the same all Humbert. Merely people are similar, well she seduced him! He says he'd never interfere with ordinary children, simply he did. Dolores was an ordinary child, it was Yous who saw her differently. Information technology's non her fault.
Page 22: "Ah, go out me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Allow them play effectually me forever. Never abound upwards." —> This is such a cute section just it'south also so grotesque.
Page 23: "that amongst the 80 or so grues I had had operate upon me, she was the only 1 that gave me a pang of 18-carat pleasure." —> Grues is French for hooker, then that'southward a lot of hookers he's been with.
Page 25: What the fuck merely happened hither.
Page 25: "but soon after, for my own safety, I decided to marry. It occurred to me that regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage, the prophylactic routine of its sleeping accommodation activities and, who knows, the eventual flowering of sure moral values, of certain spiritual substitutes, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and unsafe desires, at least to keep them under pacific control." —> Lol yeah, good solution, simply get hitched fast.
Folio 26: "Well did I know, alas, that I could obtain at the snap of my fingers any developed female I chose; in fact, it had become quite a addiction with me of not being as well attentive to women lest they come toppling, bloodripe, into my cold lap." —> Lol for fuck's sake, Humbert.
Page 26: Merkin: a pubic wig, particularly women. So when Humbert says he'due south looking just for "an blithe merkin"…yikes.
Folio 27: "the mobile moist oral cavity, no matter how I stuffed it with honey" —> Ew.
Page 28: "Years of secret sufferings had taught me superhuman self-control." —> Yeah geez, I can only imagine.
Page 30: Moll: a gangster's female companion, a prostitute.
Folio 30: "simply I noticed with a spasm of fierce cloy that the former Counselor of the Tsar, after thoroughly easing his float, had not flushed the toilet. That solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny cigarette disintegrating in it struck me equally a crowning insult, and I wildly looked around for a weapon." —> This is fair actually.
Page 30: "(Maximovich! his name of a sudden taxies back to me)" —> I will never not find this hilarious and brilliant, hahaha.
Page 30-31: "the couple had somehow got over to California and had been used there, for an excellent bacon, in a year-long experiment conducted past a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with homo and racial reactions to a nutrition of bananas and dates in a abiding position on all fours." —> What the fuck.
Page 33: "the large men on our team, the existent leaders we never saw, were mainly engaged in checking the influence of climatic amelioration on the coats of the arctic trick." —> This is interesting. Were people aware of "climatic amelioration" in those days, in the 40s and 50s as he'due south describing?
Page 33: Drumlin: elongated, teardrop-shaped hills of rock, sand and gravel that formed under moving glacier ice.
Page 40: I didn't retrieve Humbert having a photographic memory either, but I guess that fits perfectly with this book he can write full of details.
Page 44: "Last night we sat on the piazza, the Haze woman, Lolita and I." —> The Haze woman. What a overnice human he is. /southward
Page 46: "Lo came in and after pottering around, became interested in the nightmare curlicues I had penned on a canvas of paper. Oh no: they were not the outcome of a belle-lettrist'southward inspired pause between two paragraphs; they were the hideous hieroglyphics (which she could not decipher) of my fatal lust." —> Fuck.
Folio 47: "excruciatingly desirable from head to foot (all New England for a lady-writer'due south pen!)" —> Merely so he can see her naked.
Page 50: "my dolorous and hazy darling" —> I like this.
Page 51: "I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, forth with everybody else for miles around. Lolita whimpers in my arms. A free man, I enjoy her amid the ruins." —> Interesting idea you've got there, Humbert.
Folio 56: "Sitting there, on the sofa, I managed to attune, past a series of stealthy movements, my masked animalism to her guileless limbs. It was no easy affair to divert the picayune maiden'south attending while I performed the obscure adjustments necessary for the success of the trick. Talking fast, lagging behind my own breath, catching up with it, mimicking a sudden toothache to explain the breaks in my patter—and all the while keeping a maniac's inner eye on my afar gilded goal, I cautiously increased the magic friction that was doing abroad, in an illusional, if not factual sense, with the physically irremovable, but psychologically very friable texture of the material divide (pajamas and robe) betwixt the weight of two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion." —> What a fucking style to depict having to hide your erection.
Folio 59: "I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor. Admittedly no harm done." —> I guesssss. But you yet violated her with your sick volition. She just didn't know your motives.
Folio 59: "The bliss with which the vision of new delights filled me was not horrible but pathetic. I qualify it as pathetic. Pathetic—because despite the insatiable fire of my venereal appetite, I intended, with the nigh fervent force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old child." —> Loool yeah how long is this nobleness going to concluding.
Page 63: "The next instant I heard her—alive, unraped—clatter downstairs." —> Uhhh….
Page 65: "I have left out a lyrical passage which I more or less skipped at the fourth dimension, concerning Lolita'due south blood brother who died at 2 when she was 4, and how much I would have liked him." —> I do non remember this little detail at all. There's a big what-if scenario that comes along with that here.
Page 67: "Why limit myself to the pocket-sized masked caress I had tried already? Other versions of venery presented themselves to me swaying and smiling. I saw myself administering a powerful sleeping potion to both female parent and daughter so as to fondle the latter through the night with perfect impunity." —> Welp. Here nosotros get.
Page 68: "I besides bought some skilful liquor and ii or three kinds of vitamins. I was pretty sure that with the aid of these stimulants and my natural resources, I would avert any embarrassment that my indifference might incur when called upon the display a strong and impatient flame." —> Lol okay Humbert.
Page seventy: "despite the stimulants, her 'nervous, eager cheri'—a heroic cheri—had some initial trouble, for which, yet, he handsomely compensated her by a fantastic brandish of one-time-world endearments" —> What does this even mean.
Page 72-73: "My modest income added to her fifty-fifty smaller one impressed her as a brilliant fortune, non because the resulting sum now sufficed for most centre-class needs, but because even my money shone in her optics with the magic of my manliness, and she saw our joint business relationship as ane of those southern boulevards at midday that take solid shade on one side and smooth sunshine on the other, all the manner to the terminate of a prospect, where pink mountains loom." —> I experience like this is an important detail, the fact that they have a joint banking company account now.
Page 78: Duenna: an older adult female acting equally a governess and companion in accuse of girls, especially in a Spanish family. I'm pretty certain I looked this discussion up the last time I read this book too.
Page 81: "and every bit I watched, with the stark lucidity of a futurity recollection (you know—trying to come across things equally y'all will remember having seen them" —> This! This is the line I always think of!
Page 82: "Nowadays yous take to be a scientist if you lot want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither." —> Interesting.
Folio 83: I'g likewise having a hazy memory of Humbert's waterproof sentinel being important later in the story. Just I could as well be incorrect nigh that.
Page 90: "'Leslie speaking. Leslie Tomson,' said Leslie Tomson who favored a dip at dawn. 'Mrs. Humbert, sir, has been run over and you lot'd better come quick.'" —> I just love how speedily this whole series of events happens.
Folio 92: "a dead adult female, the top of her head a porridge of bone, brains, bronze hair and blood" —> Lovely.
Folio 93-94: "'Look,' he connected, 'why don' I drive there right now, and you may slumber with Jean'— (he did not really add that but Jean supported his offering so passionately that it might be unsaid)." —> Looool I forgot nigh this role.
Page 100: "and feeling equally I did her warm weight in my lap (so that, in a sense, I was always 'with Lolita' every bit a woman is 'with child')" —> Lol aye no.
Folio 104-105: "non daring really kiss her, I touched her hot, opening lips with the utmost piety, tiny sips, nada salacious; but she, with an impatient wriggle, pressed her oral fissure to mine so hard that I felt her big front end teeth and shared in the peppermint taste of her saliva." —> Time to offset taking everything he says with a grain of salt. I already was, but especially now.
Page 108: "or else they went into such complicated explanations, with geometrical gestures, geographical generalities and strictly local clues (…and and then bear south later on you hit the courthouse…) that I could not help losing my way in the maze of their well-significant gibberish." —> Lol I feel this way virtually landmark directions too, Humbert.
Page 108: "Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer's blackness nights, what frolics, what twists of lusts, you lot might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became as transparent every bit boxes of glass!" —> Ew. No thanks.
Folio 109: "'I believe 1 of the ladies was a disguised homo [my static]." —> I don't get what the brackets are supposed to mean hither.
Page 110: "'Are we to slumber in one room?' said Lo, her features working in that dynamic way they did—non cantankerous or disgusted (though plain on the brink of it) but just dynamic—when she wanted to load a question with fierce significance." —> I like that concluding function, loading a question with tearing significance.
Page 111: "'The word is incest,' said Lo—and walked into the closet" —> I practise have to wonder why these little bits of dialogue are in hither. Either they actually happened, and they're non flattering to Humbert, and likewise does Lo actually know what's going on. Or did Humbert completely invent these conversations in his memoir later as he writes it from prison, and he'south only inserting it to make her look like the seductress and he's trying to downplay her abiding "bad" talk.
Folio 111: "Seva ascendes, pulsata, brulans, kitzelans, dementissma. Elevator clatterans, pausa, clatterans, populus in corridoro. Hanc nisi mors mihi admiet nemo! Juncea puellula, jo pensavo fondissime, nobserva nihil quidquam" —> I tried to Google translate this but information technology's still incomprehensible.
Page 114: "And my only regret today is that I did non quietly deposit key '342' at the office, and go out the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere,—indeed, the globe—that aforementioned night." I don't think this is sincere, Humbert; yous're simply doing information technology for the jury. But I recall it is a regret that the reader feels one time you lot say it.
Folio 114: "I was still firmly resolved to pursue my policy of sparing her purity past operating only in the stealth of night, merely upon a completely anesthetized niggling nude." —> Cue that gif of Chidi in The Practiced Identify saying "You practice go how that's worse."
Folio 114: "and we exercise non, as dignified Orientals did in all the same more than luxurious times, apply tiny entertainers fore and aft between the mutton and the rose sherbet." —> Is he saying that we don't have girls entertain rich people between courses of meals?
Folio 115: "Despite my having dabbled in psychiatry and social work, I really knew very picayune nearly children." —> Loooool. "Dabbled." Okay.
Page 115: "The child therapist in me (simulated, as most of them are—but no matter) regurgitated neo-Freudian hash and conjured upwardly a dreaming and exaggerating Dolly in the 'latency' period of girlhood." —> This sums information technology up perfectly.
Folio 116: "In and out of my middle flowed my rainbow blood." —> I like this sentence.
Page 119: "Delight, reader: no affair your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do non skip these essential pages!" —> Lol sure Humbert, that's what we call up you are.
Page 119: "Imagine me; I shall not exist if you lot do not imagine me" —> Exactly. And that'due south what's even more horrifying, that Nabokov can put Humbert in our heads so that we are the ones right in that location with him.
Page 122: "Her kiss, to my delirious embarrassment, had some rather comical refinements of flutter and probe which made me conclude she had been coached at an early on age by a little Lesbian. No Charlie male child could take taught her that." —> Projecting, Humbert.
Page 124: "There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a concluding throb, a terminal dab of color, stinging reddish, smarting pink, a sign, a wincing child." —> Okay.
Folio 129: "This was a alone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse iii times that very morning." —> Jesus christ.
Page 130: "At the hotel nosotros had divide rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we fabricated it upwards very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go." —> Fucking hell, human being. I hate this.
Page 134: "Some motels had instructions pasted above the toilets (on whose tank the towels were unhygienically heaped) request guests not to throw into its bowl garbage, beer cans, cartons, stillborn babies" —> Lol Jesus.
Page 136: "all of them as similar to my ears every bit her various candies were to my palate" —> Ew.
Page 136: "In those days, neither she nor I had thought up yet the organisation of monetary bribes which was to piece of work such havoc with my nerves and her morals somewhat later." —> Ahh I simply had this thought: I know how she somewhen leaves Humbert, but I assume the coin he bribed her with too helped her escape from all the adult men in her life. That'south how she finally managed to escape, or at least a help in it.
Page 138: "'Only the other day nosotros read in the newspapers some bunkum well-nigh a middle-aged morals offender who pleaded guilty to the violation of the Mann act and to transporting a ix-year-old girl across state lines for immoral purposes, any those are.'" —> Is this the one brusk reference to Emerge Horner that that one author was so hell-bent on proving was critical to the origin of Lolita?
Page 140: Inutile: useless, pointless.
Page 143: "A wood in Arkansas and, on her brown shoulder, a raised purple-pinkish swelling (the work of some gnat) which I eased of its beautiful transparent toxicant between my long thumbnails and so sucked till I was gorged on her spicy blood." —> Gross.
Folio 143: "Distant mountains. Nigh mountains. More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or always turning into inhabited hill after hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures every bit alps go; heart and heaven-piercing snow-veined greyness colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a plough of the highway; timbered enormities, with a organisation of nearly overlapping night firs, interrupted in places by stake puffs of aspen; pinkish and lilac formations." —> I still love this description.
Page 144: "Shakespeare, a ghost town in New Mexico, where bad man Russian Bill was colorfully hanged seventy years ago." —> Expect this upwards. This sounds interesting.
Page 144: "Obvious Arizona, pueblo dwellings, ancient pictographs, a dinosaur track in a desert canyon, printed there thirty million years ago, when I was a child." —> Lol.
Page 144: "Mission Dolores: good title for book." —> He's not wrong.
Page 146: Priapically: (priapic) relating to or resembling a phallus; relating to male sexuality and sexual activity. Of course.
Page 148: He keeps saying he has to be wary of "the danger of those dazzling romps" when he lets Lolita go swimming, because boys will come up up side by side to her and they'll both talk to each other. But Lo is just trying to exist a regular pre-teen girl here. She's doing exactly what she'south supposed to exist doing, and Humbert is the one blocking information technology.
Page 149: "I itemize these sunny nothings mainly to prove to my judges that I did everything in my power to give my Lolita a really expert time." —> Oh what the fuck is this shit, Humbert.
Page 150: "This was one of the reasons why I tried to keep equally far away from people equally possible, while Lo, on the other mitt, would exercise her utmost to depict as many potential witnesses into her orbit as she could." —> Exactly! This is in reference to some adult female at a hotel asking Lo "whose true cat has scratched poor you," when yous know that'southward not a cat scratch at all.
Page 151: "How sweet it was to bring that java to her, so deny it until she had done her morning time duty." —> Goddamnit.
Page 152: Leporine: of or resembling a hare or hares.
Page 152: "The able psychiatrist who studies my case—and whom by now Dr. Humbert has plunged, I trust, into a state of leporine fascination—is no doubt anxious to have me accept my Lolita to the seaside and have me find in that location, at concluding, the 'gratification' of a lifetime urge, and release from the 'hidden' obsession of an incomplete childhood romance with the initial little Miss Lee." —> I mean, yeah, I guess this would be a slightly happier ending, not for Lolita still, but at least here in that location would exist hope that Humbert would stop.
Folio 154: "I recollect the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms;—a salutory storm of sobs afterwards ane of the fits of moodiness that had become and so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable yr!" —> Gee, I wonder fuckin' why, Humbert!
Page 158-159: "for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other—from the idea that around 1950 I would take to get rid somehow of a hard adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated—to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the 2nd, who would be eight or nine effectually 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l'age; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-listen, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of fourth dimension a vieillard encore vert—or was information technology green rot?—bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the 3rd the art of beingness a granddad." —> Jesus fucking Christ. This is and then icky.
Page 160: "In one of our strip maps that has happened to survive among the papers which the authorities take and then kindly allowed me to use for the purpose of writing my statement, I find some jottings that help me compute the following." —> Lol his statement is a literal novel.
Page 160: "And I catch myself thinking today that our long journeying had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined bout books, sometime tires, and her sobs in the night—every nighttime, every dark—the moment I feigned sleep." —> Ughhhhh.
Page 163: "unfortunately, on the very first day of school, workmen arrived and put up a fence some way down the gap, and in no time a construction of tawny woods maliciously arose beyond that debate utterly blocking my magic vista; and as presently every bit they had erected a sufficient amount of material to spoil everything, those absurd builders suspended their work and never appeared over again." —> Lol, good.
Page 168: "and she proved to be a brutal negotiator whenever it was in her power to deny me sure life-wrecking, strange, wearisome paradisal philters without which I could non live more than a few days in a row, and which, because of the very nature of love'south languor, I could non obtain by force." —> Why can't he obtain past force, if that's all he's been doing so far? Forcefulness or manipulation?
Page 168: "because what I feared nigh was non that she might ruin me, but that she might accumulate sufficient greenbacks to run away." —> Exactly.
Folio 171: "Above all—since we are speaking of movement and youth—I liked to see her spinning upward and down Thayer Street on her beautiful young bicycle: ascent on the pedals to work on them lustily, and then sinking back in languid posture while the speed wore itself off; and and so she would end at our mailbox and, withal astride, would flip through a magazine she establish there, and put it dorsum, and press her tongue to one side of her upperlip and button off with her foot, and again spring through pale shade and sun." —> Omfg, just let her ride her bike without sexualizing it, please, I am begging yous, Humbert.
Page 172: "I saw neighbour what's his proper name, I remember they are French or Swiss, meditate in his frank-windowed study over a typewriter, rather gaunt-profiled, an almost Hitlerian cowlick on his pale brow." —> I oasis't said much about this yet, only I am living for all these little hints to this homo who will go very important later. I detect it every fourth dimension now, the person Humbert always observes in passing just sprinkles just enough of through the novel to know he's going to exist important.
Folio 174: "The reader knows what importance I fastened to having a bevy of page girls, consolation prize nymphets, effectually my Lolita." —> Alleviation prize nymphets. What the fuck is wrong with you lot, Humbert.
Page 175: "A sudden odd thought stabbed me: was my Lo playing the pimp? If and so, she had found the wrong substitute." —> Omfg no of course not, you oaf.
Page 177: "'She is even so shuttling,' said Miss Pratt, showing how with her liver-spotted easily, 'between the anal and genital zones of development.'" —> Oh for fuck'due south sake, Pratt, and Freud.
Page 179: "'Yous only must allow her to take role in The Hunted Enchanters.'" —> There it is. Interesting that Humbert doesn't immediately comment on this name, at least recognizing its vague familiarity.
Page 180: "'Dolly has written a most obscene 4-letter word which our Dr. Cutler tells me is low-Mexican for urinal with her lipstick on some wellness pamphlets'" —> What's the word?
Page 182: Hoyden: a boisterous girl.
Page 183: "Nothing prevented one, of form, from supposing that in quest of an attractive proper noun the founder of the hotel had been immediately and solely influenced by the run a risk fantasy of the second-rate muralist he had hired, and that afterwards the hotel's name had suggested the play'due south title. Merely in my credulous, simple, benevolent mind I happened to twist it the other way round, and without giving the whole matter much thought really, supposed that mural, proper name and title had all been derived from a common source, from some local tradition, which I, an conflicting unversed in New England lore, would not be supposed to know." —> Oh Humbert. Fpr all the times you're fastidious about details and protecting yourself, this is the worst time not to exist.
Page 188: "Before their lighted porch Miss Lester was promenading Miss Fabian's dropsical dackel." —> I figured this was a dog, but manifestly a dackel is besides a dachshund.
Page 188-189: Some ten paces abroad Lolita, through the drinking glass of a phone berth (bleary god still with us), cupping the tube, confidentially hunched over it, slit her eyes at me, turned away with her treasure, hurriedly hung upward, and walked out with a flourish." —> I believe this telephone call is the important one that volition matter later.
Page 192: "the hangers were ingeniously fixed to their bars by coils of wire so as to thwart theft" —> Lol love hotels like that. Like yeah, I want to steal your hangers of all things here.
Page 194: I only looked upward Kasbeam and possibly information technology'southward not a existent place?
Folio 196: "Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; only the aroma I travelled upon was so slight equally to be practically undistinguishable from a madman's fancy." —> This is such an incredible sentence.
Page 197: "At that place it lay, ready for instant service on the person or persons, loaded and fully artsy with the slide lock in safety position, thus preluding any accidental discharge. We must remember that a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-male parent's central forelimb." —> Uh. Goddamnit, Freud.
Page 201: Kurortish: "kurort" is German for wellness resort.
Page 203: "If yous want to make a movie out of my book, take one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look." —> Lol. Did they do this?
Page 205: "'Conscientious, Dolly. Nosotros can check that, you know.'" —> Jesus, Humbert. Going to go check the restaurant receipts to run across if she actually had a coke similar she said she did.
Page 206: "Every bit the ass I was I had non memorized it." —> But he said toward the beginning that he had a photographic retentivity.
Page 207: "Iii or four miles out of Wace, I turned into the shadow of a picnic ground where the morning time had dumped its litter of calorie-free on an empty table; Lo looked up with a semi-smile of surprise and without a word I delivered a tremendous backhand cutting that caught her smack on her hot hard niggling cheekbone. And and then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of sobbing atonement, groveling love, the hopelessness of sensual reconciliation. In the velvet nighttime, at Mirana Motel (Mirana!) I kissed the yellowish soles of her long-toed feet, I immolated myself…Just it was all of no avail. Both doomed were we. And soon I was to enter a new bike of persecution." —> Jesus. I experience this so much. This is then typical of Humbert, of abusers, who corruption and then beg for forgiveness. Disgusting. And Dolly'southward sheer surprise in this moment.
Page 207: "For a day or two, I enjoyed the mental emphasis with which I told myself that we were non, and never had been followed; and and so I became sickeningly conscious that Trapp had changed his tactics and was nevertheless with the states, in this or that rented automobile. A veritable Proteus of the highway, with bewildering ease he switched from ane vehicle to another." —> The paranoia is showing.
Page 210: in that Colorado resort between Snow and Elphinstone" —> Where is this location supposed to be based on?
Folio 211: Then these young women are named Edusa and Electra Gold. What names.
Page 212: I just realized I don't even know what celluloid is, but this context on this page makes me recollect it's like movie for photography or videos.
Page 213: "In my chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board every bit a square puddle of limpid h2o with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the polish tessellated bottom, which to my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud." —> I like this description. I am the confused adversary here, hahah.
Folio 213: "Did I ever mention that her bare arm diameter the 8 of vaccination?" —> What does this mean?
Page 214: "This, to utilise an American term, in which discovery, retribution, torture, death, eternity announced in the shape of a singularly repulsive nutshell, was information technology." —> I withal dear this sentence too.
Folio 218: Alembics: a distilling tool consisting of two vessels connected by a tube.
Folio 220: "I fabricated out what looked like the silhouette of gallows on what was probably a school playground" —> Symbolic.
Page 224: Maquette: a sculptor's small preliminary model or sketch.
Page 225: "To the infirmary in general I apologized with a flourish that most bowled me over, adding still that I was not on particularly practiced terms with the remainder of the Humbert clan. To myself I whispered that I yet had my gun, and was however a free man—free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother." —> This is hilarious at first, but then dark and sinister by the end.
Page 226: Spoor: the track of odor of an animal.
Page 227: "I discovered at one time that he had foreseen my investigation and had planted insulting pseudonyms for my special benefit." —> I dear the thought of an insulting pseudonym, simply they're just insulting to the person who understands them, not insulting to to anyone else.
Page 228: Undinist: someone who is sexually angry by water or urination.
Folio 229: "The gruesome 'Harold Haze, Tombstone, Arizona' (which at another time would have appealed to my sense of humor)" —> Lol.
Folio 229: "But the nearly penetrating bodkin was the anagramtailed entry in the annals of Anecdote Social club 'Ted Hunter, Pikestaff, NH.'." —> Wow I beloved this. Amazing.
Page 234: "'And I shall be dumped where the weed decays / And the remainder is rust and stardust.'" —> I didn't retrieve that this was the context for that maybe most famous quote in this book. I didn't know information technology was a poem Humbert wrote while at the sanatorium in Quebec.
Folio 235: "Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care. My middle was as hysterical unreliable organ." —> Still beloved this quote too. I but didn't remember the context.
Folio 235: "She was twice Lolita'southward age and three quarters of mine" —> And then that means now Lolita is 14, Rita is 28 and Humbert is 42.
Page 236: Ancilla: an help to achieving or mastering something difficult.
Page 244: Bonhommie: cheerful friendliness, geniality.
Page 244: Nacreous: a milky opalescent; consisting of or resembling mother-of-pearl.
Page 246: "I could non impale her, of form, as some have thought. Yous run into, I loved her. Information technology was love at first sight, at terminal sight, at ever and ever sight." —> Some being the readers here, probably. Again, with all the talk on revenge, yes, Humbert wants to kill the man who took her away, but Nabokov also builds up a trivial element of hatred toward Lolita, just to stop it hither.
Page 249: "'Dick, this is my Dad!' cried Dolly in a resounding violent voice that struck me as totally strange and new, and cheerful, and old, and pitiful, because the young fellow, veteran of a remote war, was hard of hearing." —> Then it's 1952, which means Dick is either young enough to have just come back from Korea, or he's old enough to have been in World War Ii.
Page 250: "and then pulled the pistol's foreskin back, and then enjoyed the orgasm of the crushed trigger: I was always a good footling follower of the Viennese medicine homo." —> Lol this is hilarious because in real life Nabokov hated Freud.
Page 251: "Why do these people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?" —> Lol, he's such an former person.
Page 253: "No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and fissure, and her lovely immature velvety delicate delta exist tainted and torn" —> Ew. Why are you lot thinking about that correct at present.
Folio 254: "I covered my face with my hand and broke into the hottest tears I had always shed. I felt them winding through my fingers and downwardly my chin, and burning me, and my olfactory organ got clogged, and I could not end, and and then she touched my wrist. 'I'll dice if you impact me,' I said." —> Ugh, this one still gets me too.
Page 255: "'Good-by-aye!' she chanted, my American sweetness immortal dead honey; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this. I mean, such is the formal agreement with the then-called government." —> Aw.
Page 257: "I was weeping once more, drunk on the impossible past." —> This is a corking sentence also.
Folio 258: "Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, any lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her." —> Exactly.
Page 259: "'You know, what'southward so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own'; and information technology struck me, as my automaton knees went up and downward, that I but did not know a affair about my darling's mind and that quite perchance, behind the atrocious juvenile cliches, in that location was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to exist lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions" —> Yep, you don't say. She tin at least keep that from you lot.
Page 259: "I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, simply I loved yous. I was despicable, and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t'aimas, je t'aimas! And there were times when I knew how you lot felt, and information technology was hell to know it, my fiddling ane. Lolita girl, dauntless Dolly Schiller." —> No. Fuck this. Information technology's too late for this. And you volition never know how she felt. Never.
Page 261: "But I acknowledge that a human being of my ability of imagination cannot plead personal ignorance of universal emotions." —> And yet.
Page 265: I dear that "Reveillez-vous, Laqueue, il est temps de mourir!" translates to "Wake upward, Laqueue, it'southward time to die!"
Page 265: "My mouth was to him a splendid cave full of priceless treasures, but I denied him entrance." —> Interesting comparison and parallel here, Humbert.
Page 267: Selenian: of the moon; lunar.
Page 272: "I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. Nosotros rolled over usa." —> Lol okay.
Page 272: "In its published grade, this volume is beingness read, I presume in the beginning years of 2000 A.D. (1935 plus eighty or ninety, alive long, my love)" —> Ughhh this is so difficult to think about. Seventeen. She was 17. But imagine if she did live a long life, and this scenario were true. I literally can't even imagine that.
Folio 276: "and every time I got him with those slow, clumsy, blind bullets of mine, he would say under his jiff, with a phoney British accent—all the while dreadfully twitching, shivering, smirking, simply withal talking in a curiously detached and fifty-fifty amiable manner: 'Ah, that hurts, sir, enough! Ah, that hurts atrociously, my dear swain. I pray you, desist. Ah—very painful, very painful, indeed…God! Hah! This is abominable, yous should really non—'" —> Clare Quilty is so weird.
Folio 278: "As the music paused for a moment, in that location was a sudden noise on the stairs. Tony and I stepped out into the hall. Quilty of all people had managed to clamber out onto the landing, and there we could see him, flapping and heaving, then subsiding, forever this time, in a regal heap." —> Jesus Christ. I don't remember this role either.
Page 281: But while the blood still throbs through my writing paw, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can even so talk to you lot from here to Alaska." —> I remember I wrote a verse form called "From Here to Alaska" based on Lolita.
Page 281: "I hope you volition love your baby. I promise it will be a male child." —> Considering we all know why he both wants and doesn't want it to be a daughter.
Page 283: "this fourth dimension in English—the linguistic communication of my kickoff governness in St. Petersburg, circa 1903, a Miss Rachel Home." —> I never knew that was her name.
Page 284: I already know I demand to take a Nabokov pilgrimage to Telluride, just now I know I have to become to Afton, Wyoming; Portal, Arizona; and Ashland, Oregon, likewise.
Folio 285: "Publisher X, whose advisers got so bored with Humbert that they never got beyond page 188, had the naïveté to write me that Part Two was too long." —> Lol.
Page 286: "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, continued with other states of being where art (marvel, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm." —> I like this.
Page 287: So wait, what was the significance of the waterproof sentinel again, though?
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Source: https://rachelsbooknotes.tumblr.com/post/654476444361195520/lolita-vladimir-nabokov
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