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: […]

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. And that odd muse of mine, / My versipel, is with me everywhere, / In carrel and in car, and in my chair I at once telephoned. The Shades were out, said the cheeky ancillula, an obnoxious little fan who came to cook for them on Sundays and no doubt dreamt of getting the old poet to cuddle her some wifeless day. Whatever in my field of vision dwelt – / An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte / Stilettos of a frozen stillicide – / Was printed on my eyelids' nether side / Where it would tarry for an hour or two, / And while this lasted all I had to do / Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves, / Or indoor scene, or trophies of the eaves. Moreover, this is not a holograph but an apograph, made by a scribe for the printers – you will note that both mayors write the same hand. Somewhere an iron curtain had gone up, baring a painted one, with nymphs and nenuphars. a crested bird called in Zemblan sampel (‘silktail’), closely resembling a waxwing in shape and shade, is the model of one of the three heraldic creatures (the other two being a reindeer proper and a merman azure, crined or) in the armorial bearings of the Zemblan King, Charles the Beloved How I longed to have him (my gardener, not my landlord) wear a great big turban, and shalwars, and an ankle bracelet. The short (166 lines) Canto One, with all those amusing birds and parhelia, occupies thirteen cards. This line, and indeed the whole passage (lines 653-664), allude to the well-known poem by Goethe about the erlking, hoary enchanter of the elf-haunted alderwood, who falls in love with the delicate little boy of a belated traveler. [A] few days later [I] had rented for the month of August what looked in the snapshots they sent me like a cross between a mujik's izba and Refuge Z, but it had a tiled bathroom and cost dearer than my Appalachian castle. For a Christian, no Beyond is acceptable or imaginable without the participation of God in our eternal destiny, and this in turn implies a condign punishment for every sin, great and small.

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. it was ordered by Marina, who had it framed and set up in her bedroom next to a picture of her brother at twelve or fourteen clad in a bayronka (open shirt) and cupping a guinea pig in his gowpen (hollowed hands) […] At the end of his so remote, so near, 1884 summer Van, before leaving Ardis, was to make a visit of adieu to Ada's larvarium. All Van saw there of his new Ada were her ivorine thighs and haunches, and the very first time he clasped them she bade him, in the midst of his vigorous joy, to glance across her shoulder over the window ledge [...]. Involuntarily Lucette bent her head and frail spine, then she lay back on the outer half of Ada’s pillow in a martyr’s pudibund swoon, her locks spreading their orange blaze against the black velvet of the padded headboard. In very rare cases, when the matrix just goes on pegging away automatically, the doctor can take advantage of that and ease out the second brat who then can be considered to be, say, three minutes younger [...]. When he returned from a swim in the broad and deep brook beyond the bosquet, with wet hair and tingling skin, Van got the rare treat of finding his foreglimpse of live ivory accurately reproduced [...]. Then standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. He had buried his mouth in Ada's nuque, when she stiffened and raised a warning finger. Demon popped into his mouth a last morsel of black bread with elastic samlet, gulped down a last pony of vodka and took his place at the table with Marina facing him across its oblong length. The iridal dark-brown of her serious eyes had the enigmatic opacity of an Oriental hypnotist's look (in a magazine's back-page advertisement) and seemed to be placed higher that usual so that between its lower rim and the moist lower lid a cradle crescent of white remained when she stared straight at you. On the other hand, no woman who had ever borne a child (even in her own childhood) could be accepted, no matter how free she was of mammilary blemishes. At that moment he felt quite proud of his stratagem. He was to recall it with a fatidic shiver seventeen years later [...]. I summoned all the twenty hirens of the house (including the sweet-lipped, glossy chinned darling) into my resurrected presence. she had loosened her hair and changed into the curtal frock of sunbright cotton that he was so fond of and had so ardently yearned to soil in the so recent past. A boxwood-lined path, presided over by a nostalgic-looking sempervirent sequoia (which American visitor mistook for a ‘Lebanese cedar’ – if they remarked it at all) took them to the absurdly misnamed rue du Mûrier […] A window was open, and the crickets were stridulating at an ominous speed in the black motionless foliage. She had just slipped her demission, with a footnote on the young lady's conduct, under the door of Madame. The passage of time could only enhance his tenderness for the creature he clasped, this adored creature, whose motion was now more supple, whose haunches had grown more lyrate, whose hair-ribbon he had undone. The streets had been considerably quieter in the sourdine Past. He groped for his loafers and walked aimlessly for some time among the trees of the coppice where thrushes were singing so richly, with such sonorous force, such fluty fioriture that one could not endure the agony of consciousness, the filth of life, the loss, the loss, the loss. a big mulberry-colored cake of soap slithered out of her hand, and her black-socked foot hooked the door shut with a bang which was more the echo of the soap's crashing against the marble board than a sign of pudic displeasure.