Vladimir Nabokov

Sebastian, still not alone, is seated on the white-and-cinder-grey trunk of a felled tree. […] A Camberwell Beauty skims past and settles on the kerf, fanning its velvety wings.

There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: […]

I realised I was the only shopper in that rather eerie place where I moved about fishlike, in a glaucous aquarium […]

He then returned to his carrell for his own research.

The young woodwose had now closed his eyes and was stretched out supine on the pool's marble margin; his Tarzan brief had been cast aside on the turf.

[…] the friendly and eloquent monarch would be interrupted by a pertussal "backdraucht" in a crowd of school-children.

Otar, a pleasant and cultured adeling with a tremendous nose and sparse hair, had his two mistresses with him

afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as flowergirls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the fireworks, and the pale upturned faces.

In her version of Donne's famous Holy Sonnet X composed in his widowery: […]

I saw a couple, later identified for me as Mr Colt, a local lawyer, and his wife, whose blundering Cadillac half entered my driveway before retreating in a flurry of luminous nictitation.

Yes, after a thorough perlustration of the loot that Andron and Niagarushka had obtained from the Queen's rosewood writing desk (mostly bills, and treasured snapshots, and those silly medals) a letter from the King did turn up.

I have never acknowledged printed praise though sometimes I longed to embrace the glowing image of this or that paragon of discernment; and I have never bothered to lean out of my window and empty my skoramis on some poor hack's pate.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; / I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I / Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

That is why goetic magic does not always work. The demons in their prismatic malice betray the agreement between us and them, and we are again in the chaos of chance.

On a sunny September morning, with the trees still green, but the asters and fleabanes already taking over in ditch and dalk, Van set out for Ladoga, N.A.

Then the anguish increased to unendurable massivity and nightmare dimensions, making her scream and vomit.

There was a crescent eaten out of a vine leaf by a sphingid larva.

He knew she was nothing but a fubsy pig-pink whorelet and would elbow her face away when she attempted to kiss him after he had finished […]

Van was delighted and shocked to distinguish, right there in the inky shrubbery, Ada in her long nightgown passing by with a lighted candle in one hand and a shoe in the other as if stealing after the belated ignicolists.

I have frequented bordels since my sixteenth year, but […] nothing about them pre-announced the luxury and mollitude of my first Villa Venus.

He must be gaga to have forgotten what she said the last time about her strange anthophobia (somehow stemming from that debauche à trois thirty years ago). Roses she never liked anyway.

Demon screwed in his monocle, unclicked out of its special flat case a small pen-and-wash and said he thought (did not doubt, in fact, but wished his certitude to be admired) that it was an unknown product of Parmigianino's tender art.

no direct access could be obtained to the banned, or burned, books of the three cosmologists, Xertigny, Yates and Zotov (pen names), who had recklessly started the whole business half a century earlier, causing, and endorsing, panic, demency and execrable romanchiks.

Ada, on the grass, kept trying to make an anadem of marguerites for the dog while Lucette looked on, munching a crumpet.