Lolita

• “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.”

• “The moral sense in mortals is the duty/We have to pay on the mortal sense of beauty.” 

• "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share"

Transparent Things

• "Transparent things, through which the past shines"

• "I have fallen in love with you but shall do nothing about it. In short I am an all-round genius."

• "The commonplaces he and she had exchanged blazed with authenticity against the forced guffaws in the bogus bar."

• "How fast do dreams catch up with new fashions?"

• "Her husband always felt a flow of special tenderness that reconciled him to the boring or brutal ugliness of what not very happy people call 'life' every time he noted in neat, efficient, clear-headed Armande the beauty and helplessness of human abstraction."

• "The greyness of rain would soon engulf everything"

• "One of those instant unverified visions which can fool the cleverest man"

Laughter in the Dark

• "...they had just slid past him, leaving for a day or two that hopeless sense of loss which makes beauty what it is."

Swann's Way,  trans. Lydia Davis

• “We try to rediscover in things, now precious because of it, the glimmer that our soul projected on them; we are disappointed to find that they seem to lack in nature the charm they derived in our thoughts from the proximity of certain ideas; at times we convert all the forces of that soul into cunning, into magnificence, in order to have an effect on people who are outside us, as we are well aware, and whom we will never reach.” 

• “… I was nevertheless obliged to continue along the road to Combray admitting to myself that there was less and less chance that she had been placed in my path. And if she had been there, would I have dared talk to her? It seemed to me she would have thought that I was mad; I no longer believed that the desires which I formed during my walks, and which were not fulfilled, were shared by other people, that they had any reality outside of me. They now seemed to me no more than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creations of my temperament. They no long had any attachment to nature, to reality, which from then on lost all its charm and significance…” 

• “Knowing a thing does not always allow us to prevent it, but at least the things we know, we hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can arrange them as we like, which gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them.”

• “‘I do find it absurd that a man of his intelligence should suffer over a person of that sort, who isn’t even interesting - because they say she’s an idiot,’ she added with the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.”

• The Waves

  • “Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is not beauty enough in the moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat.” 

  • “'If I could believe,' said Rhoda, 'that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should be rid of my fear: nothing persists. One moment does not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps. You did not see me come. I circled round the chairs to avoid the horror of the spring. I am afraid of you all. I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do--I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces. I have no end in view. I do not know how to run minute to minute and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass that you call life. Because you have an end in view--one person, is it, to sit beside, an idea is it, your beauty is it? I do not know--your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green of forest rides to a hound running on the scent. But there is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.”

  • "Soon, too, a maid came in with a note, and as she turned to answer it and I felt my own curiosity to know what she was writing and to whom, I saw the first leaf fall on his grave. I saw us push beyond this moment, and leave it behind us for ever. And then sitting side by side on the sofa we remembered inevitably what had been said by others; "the lily of the day is fairer far in May"; we compared Percival to a lily--Percival whom I wanted to lose his hair, to shock the authorities, to grow old with me; he was already covered with lilies."

• Mrs. Dalloway

  • "She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on."

  • "Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened."

  • "He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square."

  • "A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre, which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone."