Friends = literary characters

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind.  No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs.  Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear.  Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them...We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he confirms to our notion of him every time we hear of him.  Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical.  We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.

p. 281, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, Aug/Sept. 2010 

The little given and the great promised

There was in the fiery phantasm a perfection which made my wild delight also perfect, just because the vision was out of reach, with no possibility of attainment to spoil it by the awareness of an appended taboo; indeed, it may well be that the very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised - the great rosegray never-to-be-had.

p. 289, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, Aug/Sept. 2010

Happy abroad

Why did I hope we would be happy abroad?  A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

p. 254, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, Aug/Sept. 2010

Wrong verbs

My west-door neighbor, who might have been a businessman or a college teacher, or both, would speak to me once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered his car, or, at a later date, defrosted his driveway (I don't mind if these verbs are all wrong)...

p. 189, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, Aug/Sept. 2010