Lisawr

“As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome."
"And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody."
"And yours," he replied with a smile, "is wilfully to misunderstand them.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“I was six years old, watching my pregnant mother wash the dishes. Cutlery clinked, filling the air with sparkling bursts of colour.
'Do it again!' I begged her, bouncing in my seat.
My mother glanced back at me. 'Do what?'
'Make the stars.'
'Stars?'
It never occurred to me that she couldn't' see what I was seeing. 'The gold ones', I said.
'I don't know what you're talking about.' she replied, and with a child's impatience, I hopped down from my stool to show her.
'Like this,' I said, taking two spoons and clanging them together. Each clink produced another starburst expanding luminous through the air between us.
'You mean,' said my mother slowly, 'the sound makes you think of the stars?'
'No, it makes the stars..”
― R.J. Anderson, Ultraviolet