It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the cor — P. G. Wodehouse

"I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back."

"Love has had a lot of press-agenting from the oldest times; but there are higher, nobler things than love."

"I like to be surrounded by joy and life, and I know nothing more joyless and deader than a dead fish. Multiply that dead fish by a million, and you have an environment which only a Dante could contemplate with equanimity."

"He resembled a minor prophet who had been hit behind the ear with a stuffed eel-skin."

"The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say `When!"

"At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies."

"At one point a heated discussion arose over the possible interpretation of Lolita as a grandiose metaphor of the classic Europeans hopeless love for young, seductive, barbaric America. In his afterword to the novel Nabokov himself mentions this as the naive theory of one of the publishers who turned the book down. And although there cant be the slightest doubt that Nabokov did not mean to limit Lolita to that interpretation, there is no reason to exclude it as one of the novels many dimensions. The point, I felt, became obvious when one drew the line between Lolita as a delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography and Lolita as a literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of our century."

"Lovely food, for rabbits, that is."

"One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved."

"[explaining to Ernie how April apologized to him] She just showed up at the factory, took off her coat, and begged me to take her. We made love in a way that Ive only ever seen in nature films."

"Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised."

"He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust — just uneasiness — nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a... a... faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. That was evident in such things as the deplorable state of the station. He had no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come to him — why? Perhaps because he was never ill . . . He had served three terms of three years out there . . . Because triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself."