Month: September 2014

 

The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry and many manqu talents do; but I was even more manqu than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita