Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill. Oh, my poor Charlotte, do not hate me in your eternal heaven among an eternal alchemy of asphalt and rubber and metal and stone […]
✻
(Jean, whatever, wherever you are, in minus time-space or plus soul-time, forgive me all this, parenthesis included)
✻
And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy.
✻
(ed. Lolita, looking at the odometer)
“Oh, look, all the nines are changing into the next thousand.”
✻
Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?
✻
A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
✻
”… Because, really,” I continued, “there is no point in staying here.”
“There is no point in staying anywhere,” said Lolita.