Commonplace

Speak, Memory:

I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception. (125)

And now she sits down, or rather she tackles the job of sitting down, the jelly of her jowl quaking, her prodigious posterior, with the three buttons on the side, lowers itself warily; then, at the last second, she surrenders her bulk to the wicker armchair, which, out of sheer fright, bursts into a salvo of crackling. (96)

How small the cosmos (a kangeroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human conciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words! (24)

So there it comes, steering out of a flock of small dappled clouds, which it tinges with a vague iridescence; as it sails higher, it glazes the runner tracks left on the road, where every sparkling lump of snow is emphasized by a swollen shadow.

...The vibration in my ears is no longer their receding bells, but only my old blood singing. All is still, spellbound, enthralled by the moon, fancy's rearvision mirror. The snow is real, though, and as I bend to it and scoop up a handful, sixty years crumble to glittering frost-dust between my fingers. (99-100)

How readily Mr. Cummings would sit down on a stool, part behind with both hands his--what? was he wearing a frock coat? I see only the gesture--and proceed to open the black tin paintbox.

At the top of the stairs, one's feet would be automatically lifted to the deceptive call of "Step", and then, with a momentary sense of exquisite panic, with a wild contraction of muscles, would sink into the phantasm of a step, padded, as it were, with the infinitely elastic stuff of its own nonexistence. (84)

LOLITA:

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained rectangles and its asymetrical position-a knight's move from the top-always strangely disturbed me.

Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch.

But even had they blinded her, still nothing might have happened, had not precise fate, that synchronizing phantom, mixed within its alembic the car and the dog and the sun and the shade and the wet and the weak and the strong and the stone. Adieu, Marlene! Fat fate's formal handshake (as reproduced be Beale before leaving the room) brought me out of my torpor; and I wept. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury-I wept.