86
" And then, of course, there was the sari itself. What a garment, Randy! There isn’t another outfit in the world that balances better the twin feminine urges to conceal and reveal. It outlines the woman’s shape but hides the faults a skirt can’t — under a sari a heavy behind, unflattering legs are invisible. But it also reveals the midriff, a part of the anatomy most Western women hide all the time. I was mesmerized, Randy, by the mere fact of being able to see her belly button when she walked, the single fold of flesh above the knot of her sari, the curve of her waist toward her hips. That swell of flesh just above a woman’s hipbone, Randy, is the sexiest part of the female anatomy to me. And I didn’t even have to undress her to see it. I was completely smitten. "
― Shashi Tharoor , Riot
91
" and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds... but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped. What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon grand pch radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I cancelled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and halfthrottled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque, part o nous ne serons jamais spars; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torneven then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita. "
― Vladimir Nabokov , Lolita
92
" For Alwyn's grandfather, who was known as " the greatest talker in the country," used words which no one else understood, words which he did not understand, and words which do not exist, to swell a passionate theme, to confound his neighbors in an argument, and for their own sake. He would say, for example, " My farm was the very apocalypse of fertility, but the renter has rested on his oars till it is good for nothing," or " Manifest the bounty to pass the salt shaker in my direction." Something of the Bible, something of an Irish inheritance, something of a liar's anxiety, made of his most ordinary remark a strange and wearisome oratory. "
