"It is so natural to expect your own image when seeing a mirrored surface, almost to validate your presence in the space you occupy. The piece does not give the viewer any sense of this satisfaction."
"Nabokov creates quite a web for his readers, meant to at once ensnare them through Humbert’s beckoning, but also by revealing the web itself through his aesthetic manipulation of language as a medium." An essay on the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Lolita.
"With every morally questionable work of art or fiction there are those who become obsessed with 'deliberate moralizing.'" An essay on Nabokov's Lolita.
“This is the nature of war,” proclaims Judge Holden, “whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification.” A study of violence in the American West.