Reading Lolita...part 2

So I know that I keep giving you text when what you really want is photos. The good news--we are one step closer to photos: I have figured out how to safely recharge my camera in Europe without exploding anything. However, I've still got some roadblocks between getting photos from camera to blog. But that's boring...

I promised some quotes, and I promised to loan the book to a friend, so here they are while I still have the book.

(For background on this book, scroll down a couple posts. -- now that I re-read them, they sound a little whiny in this grouping, but the book didn't strike me that way at all.)

"Now that I could not call myself a teacher, a writer, now that I could not wear what I would normally wear, walk in the streets to the beat of my own body, shout if I wanted to or pat a male colelague on the back on the spur of the moment, now that all of this was illegal, I felt light and fictional, as if I were walking on air, as if I had been written into being and then erased in one quick swipe" (p. 167).

"I became again the child I had been when I would indiscriminately and waywardly pick up books, slouch in the nearest available corner, and read and read. I picked up ... any book I could get my hands on in my father's library, in secondhand bookstores, in the still-unravaged libraries in friends' houses--and read them all, an alcoholic drowning her inarticulate sorrows" (p.170).

"We were unhappy. We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had, and somehow there was little consolation in the fact that millions of people were unhappier than we were. Why should other people's misery make us happier or more content?" (p. 313-314).

"You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again" (p. 336).

And she quotes Henry James as writing to a young war widow, "I am incapable of telling you not to repine and rebel, because I have so, to my cost, the imagination of all things, and because I am in capable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel I say--feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who ar our pride and our inspiration" (p. 213).

Now to get those photos...