Humbert: How are the piano lessons going? Lolita: Fine.
Great. Excellent. Wonderful. Perfect. Humbert: Especially
since you missed the last two.
[Of his childhood love, Annabel] Humbert: The shock of her
death froze something in me. The child I loved was gone,
but I kept looking for her -- long after I had left my own
childhood behind. The poison was in the wound, you see.
And the wound wouldn't heal.
Lolita: You look one hundred percent better when I can't
see you.
Lolita: I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you did to
me.
Humbert: I missed you. I missed you a lot. Lolita: Well
I haven't missed you. In fact, I've been revoltingly unfaithful
to you. But it doesn't matter, because you don't care about
me anymore anyway. Humbert: What makes you think I don't
care about you? Lolita: Well you haven't kissed me yet,
have you? ----
Lolita: Murder me! Murder me like you murdered my mother!
Humbert Humbert: What I heard then was the melody of children
at play. Nothing but that. And I knew that the hopelessly
poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but
the absence of her voice from that chorus.
Humbert Humbert: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta.
Humbert Humbert: We had been everywhere. We had really seen
nothing.
Clare Quilty: He can smell if you're sweet. He likes sweet
young people. People like you.
Humbert Humbert: Lo, plain Lo in the morning, standing four-feet-ten
in one sock. She was Lola in slacks... Dolly at school...
Dolores on the dotted line. In my arms, she was always Lolita.
Light of my life. Fire of my loins. My sin. My soul. Lo-lee-ta.
Humbert Humbert: A normal man, given a group photograph
of school girls and asked to point out the loveliest one,
will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them.
Charlotte Haze: I asked you to make your bed. Didn't I?
Lolita: No. You asked me if I'd made my bed.
Lolita: I feel like we're grown-ups. Humbert: Me, too. Lolita:
We get to do whatever we want, right? Humbert: Whatever
we want.
Miss Pratt: I know you have accepted a post at Beardsley
College, and I know that there, academics are first, last,
and always. Well, that's not us, Mister Humper. Here at
Beardsley Prep... what we stress are the three Ds. Dramatics,
Dancing, and Dating.
Humbert: I was not quite prepared for the reality of my
dual role. On the one hand, the willing corruptor of an
innocent, and on the other, Humbert the happy housewife.
Miss Pratt: She's a lovely child, Mr. Haze, but the onset
of sexual maturing seems to be giving her trouble. It is
the general impression that 14-year-old Dolores is morbidly
disinterested in sexual matters.
Humbert: I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly
as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything
I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf
echo of the nymphet from long ago -- but I loved her, this
Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child.
She could fade and wither -- I didn't care. I would still
go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.
Humbert: From here to that old car you know so well is a
stretch of twenty-five paces. Make those twenty-five steps.
With me. Now. Lolita: You're saying you'll give us the money
if I go to a motel with you? Humbert: No, no, no. I mean
leave here now, and come live with me. And die with me,
and everything with me. Lolita: You're crazy.
