146

His hair, the hue of damp straw, was sleeked down and evenly parted by a line which ran up the exact middle of his head to conclude a cunning agreement with its crown.

p222

As so often happens when one has betrayed a person Shock's face struck her as new, as almost that of a stranger.

p.237

The Potato Elf by Vladamir Nabokov from A Russian Beauty and Other Stories

The more people one attracts, the less deeply one attracts them.

p284 On Love - Stendhal

The clichés are, of course, disguised.... They are like those assorted cookies that differ from one another only in shape and shade, whereby their shrewd makers ensnare the salivating consumer in a mad Pavlovian world where at no extra cost, variations in simple visual values influence and gradually replace flavour, which thus goes the way of talent and truth.

p126

147

I am insidiously influenced by the standard artistry of modern photography and I feel how much easier writing must have been in former days when one's imagination was not hemmed in by innumerable visual aids, and a frontiersman looking at his first giant cactus or his first high snows was not necessarily reminded of a tire company's pictorial advertisement. p164

Nabokov Rogen - Penguine edition - Lance

Only by keeping his own special vision, his own two eyes, focused and active, can he discern what has disappeared from this earth. Happily landscapes and cities do not disappear as rapidly as the men who live in them... As with all travel experience it is very hard to make others feel it: Our feeling are our own, as are the inner landscapes where those feelings exist.

Leon Edel - Jan. 21, 1973 - New York Times

Aug. 12. 81