Lolita

here's the excerpt of lolita promised awhile ago... shida, have fun... ;)

"Now i wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal the true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is demoniac): and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as "nymphets'.

It will be marked that i substitute time terms for spatial ones. In fact, I would have the reader see "nine" and "fourteen" as the boundaries- the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks- of an enchanted islan haunted by those nymphets of mine and surroundes by a vast, misty sea. Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not. Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, would have long gone insane. Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependant on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena that on that intangible island of entranced tune where Lolita plays with her likes. Within the same age limits the number of true nymphets is strikingly inferior to that of provisionally plain, or just nice, or "cute", or even "sweet" and "attractive," ordinary, plumpish formless, cold-skinned, essentially human little girls, with tummies and pigtails, who may or may not turn into adults of great beauty (look at the ugly dumplings in black stockings and white hats that are metamorphosed into stunning stars of the screen). A normal man given a group photograph of school girls of Girls Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine( oh how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs- the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate- the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognixed by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power."

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov