There Are Aphorisms That, Like Airplanes, Stay

Freudism And All It Has Tainted With Its Grotesque Implications And Methods, Appear To Me To Be One Of The Vilest Deceits Practiced By People On Themselves And On Others. I Reject It Utterly, Along With A Few Other Medieval Items Still Adored By The Ignorant, The Conventional, Or The Very Sick.

There Is Nothing Dictators Hate So Much As That Unassailable, Eternally Elusive, Eternally Provoking Gleam. One Of The Main Reasons Why The Very Gallant Russian Poet Gumilev Was Put To Death By Lenin's Ruffians Thirty Odd Years Ago Was That During The Whole Ordeal, In The Prosecutor's Dim Office, In The Torture House, In The Winding Corridors That Led To The Truck, In The Truck That Took Him To The Place Of Execution, And At That Place Itself, Full Of The Shuffling Feet Of The Clumsy And Gloomy Shooting Squad, The Poet Kept Smiling.

There Are Two Kinds Of Visual Memory: One When You Skillfully Recreate An Image In The Laboratory Of Your Mind, With Your Eyes Open (and Then I See Annabel In Such General Terms As: "honey-colored Skin," "thin Arms," "brown Bobbed Hair," "long Lashes," "big Bright Mouth"); And The Other When You Instantly Evoke, With Shut Eyes, On The Dark Innerside Of Your Eyelids, The Objective, Absolutely Optical Replica Of A Beloved Face, A Little Ghost In Natural Colors (and This Is How I See Lolita).

I Sometimes Used To Ask Myself, What On Earth Did I Love Her For? Maybe Fore The Warm Hazel Iris Of Her Fluffy Eyes, Or For The Natural Side-wave Of Her Brown Hair, Done Anyhow, Or Again For That Movement Of Her Plump Shoulders. But, Probably The Truth Was That I Loved Her Because She Loved Me. To Her I Was The Ideal Man: Brains, Pluck. And There Was None Dressed Better. I Remember Once, When I First Put On That New Dinner Jacket, With The Vast Trousers, She Clapsed Her Hands, Sank Down On A Chair And Murmured: 'oh, Hermann...." It Was Ravishment Bordering Upon Something Like Heavenly Woe.

Devices Which In Some Curious New Way Imitate Nature Are Attractive To Simple Minds.