Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 180 of 344 · 20 per page

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  declaimed Stepan Arkadyevitch, just as he had done before to Levin. Vronsky smiled with a look that seemed to say that he did not deny it, but he promptly changed the subject. “And whom are you meeting?” he asked. “I? I’ve come to meet a pretty woman,” said Oblonsky. “You don’t say so!” “_Honi soit qui mal y pense!_ My sister Anna.” “Ah! that’s Madame Karenina,” said Vronsky. “You know her, no doubt?” “I think I do. Or perhaps not ... I really am not sure,” Vronsky answered heedlessly, with a vague recollection of something stiff and tedious evoked by the name Karenina. “But Alexey Alexandrovitch, my celebrated brother-in-law, you surely must know. All the world knows him.” “I know him by reputation and by sight. I know that he’s clever, learned, religious somewhat.... But you know that’s not ... _not in my line,_” said Vronsky in English. “Yes, he’s a very remarkable man; rather a conservative, but a splendid man,” observed Stepan Arkadyevitch, “a splendid man.” “Oh, well, so much the better for him,” said Vronsky smiling. “Oh, you’ve come,” he said, addressing a tall old footman of his mother’s, standing at the door; “come here.” Besides the charm Oblonsky had in general for everyone, Vronsky had felt of late specially drawn to him by the fact that in his imagination he was associated with Kitty. “Well, what do you say? Shall we give a supper on Sunday for the _diva?_” he said to him with a smile, taking his arm. “Of course. I’m collecting subscriptions. Oh, did you make the acquaintance of my friend Levin?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Yes; but he left rather early.” “He’s a capital fellow,” pursued Oblonsky. “Isn’t he?” “I don’t know why it is,” responded Vronsky, “in all Moscow people—present company of course excepted,” he put in jestingly, “there’s something uncompromising. They are all on the defensive, lose their tempers, as though they all want to make one feel something....” “Yes, that’s true, it is so,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, laughing good-humoredly. “Will the train soon be in?” Vronsky asked a railway official. “The train’s signaled,” answered the man. The approach of the train was more and more evident by the preparatory bustle in the station, the rush of porters, the movement of policemen and attendants, and people meeting the train. Through the frosty vapor could be seen workmen in short sheepskins and soft felt boots crossing the rails of the curving line. The hiss of the boiler could be heard on the distant rails, and the rumble of something heavy.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  In some little town in the Sun Valley of Idaho, before a brick hotel, pale and flushed bricks nicely mixed, with, opposite, a poplar playing its liquid shadows all over the local Honor Roll. In a sage brush wilderness, between Pinedale and Farson. Somewhere in Nebraska, on Main Street, near the First National Bank, established 1889, with a view of a railway crossing in the vista of the street, and beyond that the white organ pipes of a multiple silo. And on McEwen St., corner of Wheaton Ave., in a Michigan town bearing his first name. We came to know the curious roadside species, Hitchhiking Man, Homo pollex of science, with all its many sub-species and forms: the modest soldier, spic and span, quietly waiting, quietly conscious of khaki’s viatic appeal; the schoolboy wishing to go two blocks; the killer wishing to go two thousand miles; the mysterious, nervous, elderly gent, with brand-new suitcase and clipped mustache; a trio of optimistic Mexicans; the college student displaying the grime of vacational outdoor work as proudly as the name of the famous college arching across the front of his sweatshirt; the desperate lady whose battery has just died on her; the clean-cut, glossy-haired, shifty-eyed, white-faced young beasts in loud shirts and coats, vigorously, almost priapically thrusting out tense thumbs to tempt lone women or sadsack salesmen with fancy cravings. “Let’s take him,” Lo would often plead, rubbing her knees together in a way she had, as some particularly disgusting pollex , some man of my age and shoulder breadth, with the face à claques of an unemployed actor, walked backwards, practically in the path of our car. Oh, I had to keep a very sharp eye on Lo, little limp Lo! Owing perhaps to constant amorous exercise, she radiated, despite her very childish appearance, some special languorous glow which threw garage fellows, hotel pages, vacationists, goons in luxurious cars, maroon morons near blued pools, into fits of concupiscence which might have tickled my pride, had it not incensed my jealousy. For little Lo was aware of that glow of hers, and I would often catch her coulant un regard in the direction of some amiable male, some grease monkey, with a sinewy golden-brown forearm and watch-braceleted wrist, and hardly had I turned my back to go and buy this very Lo a lollipop, than I would hear her and the fair mechanic burst into a perfect love song of wisecracks.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  And there are costs involved in denying one’s evolved sexual nature, costs paid by individuals, couples, families, and societies every day and every night. They are paid in what E. O. Wilson called “the less tangible currency of human happiness that must be spent to circumvent our natural predispositions.”2 Whether or not our society’s investment in sexual repression is a net gain or loss is a question for another time. For now, we’ll just suggest that trying to rise above nature is always a risky, exhausting endeavor, often resulting in spectacular collapse. Any attempt to understand who we are, how we got to be this way, and what to do about it must begin by facing up to our evolved human sexual predispositions. Why do so many forces resist our sustained fulfillment? Why is conventional marriage so much damned work? How has the incessant, grinding campaign of socio-scientific insistence upon the naturalness of sexual monogamy combined with a couple thousand years of fire and brimstone failed to rid even the priests, preachers, politicians, and professors of their prohibited desires? To see ourselves as we are, we must begin by acknowledging that of all Earth’s creatures, none is as urgently, creatively, and constantly sexual as Homo sapiens. We don’t claim that men and women experience their eroticism in precisely the same ways, but as Tiresias noted, both women and men find considerable pleasure there. True, it may take most women a bit longer to get the sexual motor running than it does men, but once warmed up, most women are fully capable of leaving any man far behind. No doubt, males tend to be more concerned with a woman’s looks, while most women find a man’s character more compelling than his appearance (within limits, of course). And it’s true that women’s biology gives them a lot more to consider before a roll in the hay. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld sums it up in terms of fire and firemen: “The basic conflict between men and women, sexually, is that men are like firemen. To men, sex is an emergency, and no matter what we’re doing we can be ready in two minutes. Women, on the other hand, are like fire. They’re very exciting, but the conditions have to be exactly right for it to occur.” Perhaps for many women libido is like the hunger of a gourmand. Unlike many men, such women don’t yearn to eat just to stop the hunger. They’re looking for particular satisfactions presented in certain ways. Where most men can and do hunger for sex in the abstract, women report wanting narrative, character, a reason for sex.* In other words, we agree with many of the observations central to evolutionary psychology—it’s the contorted, internally conflicted explanations for these observations that we find problematic.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Wednesday . “Look, make Mother take you and me to Our Glass Lake tomorrow.” These were the textual words said to me by my twelve-year-old flame in a voluptuous whisper, as we happened to bump into one another on the front porch, I out, she in. The reflection of the afternoon sun, a dazzling white diamond with innumerable iridescent spikes quivered on the round back of a parked car. The leafage of a voluminous elm played its mellow shadows upon the clapboard wall of the house. Two poplars shivered and shook. You could make out the formless sounds of remote traffic; a child calling “Nancy, Nan-cy!” In the house, Lolita had put on her favorite “Little Carmen” record which I used to call “Dwarf Conductors,” making her snort with mock derision at my mock wit. Thursday . Last night we sat on the piazza, the Haze woman, Lolita and I. Warm dusk had deepened into amorous darkness. The old girl had finished relating in great detail the plot of a movie she and L. had seen sometime in the winter. The boxer had fallen extremely low when he met the good old priest (who had been a boxer himself in his robust youth and could still slug a sinner). We sat on cushions heaped on the floor, and L. was between the woman and me (she had squeezed herself in, the pet). In my turn, I launched upon a hilarious account of my arctic adventures. The muse of invention handed me a rifle and I shot a white bear who sat down and said: Ah! All the while I was acutely aware of L.’s nearness and as I spoke I gestured in the merciful dark and took advantage of those invisible gestures of mine to touch her hand, her shoulder and a ballerina of wool and gauze which she played with and kept sticking into my lap; and finally, when I had completely enmeshed my glowing darling in this weave of ethereal caresses, I dared stroke her bare leg along the gooseberry fuzz of her shin, and I chuckled at my own jokes, and trembled, and concealed my tremors, and once or twice felt with my rapid lips the warmth of her hair as I treated her to a quick nuzzling, humorous aside and caressed her plaything.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  But a delicious abandon took hold of her. The slaves wailed as they huddled together behind the low railing, and the driver had already taken his place while the cart was surrounded by mounted soldiers. "One more," Lord Gregory called to the Captain of the Guard, and Beauty heard the cries of the slaves grow louder. She was lifted by heavy hands, her legs dangling in the air. "All right, little Princess," the Captain laughed as he set her down in the cart, and Beauty felt its rough wood beneath her feet as she struggled to keep her balance. For one instant, she glanced back and saw the tear-stained face of Lady Juliana. "Why, she is actually suffering," Beauty thought in amazement. And high above she suddenly saw the Prince and Lord Stefan in the only torchlit window of the dark castle. It seemed the Prince saw her look up; and the slaves about her, seeing the window as well, set up a chorus of vain pleading. The Prince turned away miserably just as Lord Stefan had turned his back on the captives earlier. Beauty felt the cart move. The great wheels creaked and the horses' hooves rang on the cobblestones. All about her the frantic slaves tumbled against one another. She looked before her and almost at once saw the calm blue eyes of Prince Tristan. He struggled towards her as she moved towards him, though around them the slaves flinched and squirmed to avoid the spirited thrashing from the guards who rode along beside them. Beauty felt the deep cut of a strap on her calf, but Prince Tristan was no pressed against her. Her breasts were sealed to his warm chest and her cheek rested against his shoulder. His thick rigid organ passed between her wet thighs and stroked her sex roughly. Struggling not to fall, she mounted the organ and felt it slip inside her. She thought of the village, the auction soon to begin, all the terrors that awaited her. And when she thought of her dear defeated Prince and her poor, grieving Lady Juliana she was again smiling. But Prince Tristan filled her mind as he struggled, it seemed, with his whole body to pierce her and enfold her. Even among the cries of the others, she heard his whisper behind his gag: "Beauty, are you frightened?" "No!" she shook her head. She pressed her tortured mouth to his, and as he lifted her with his thrusts, she felt his heart pounding against her.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Held her roughly by the shoulders, then tenderly by the temples, and turned her about. “It’s right there,” she said, “I can feel it.” “Swiss peasant would use the tip of her tongue.” “Lick it out?” “Yeth. Shly try?” “Sure,” she said. Gently I pressed my quivering sting along her rolling salty eyeball. “Goody-goody,” she said nictating. “It is gone.” “Now the other?” “You dope,” she began, “there is noth—” but here she noticed the pucker of my approaching lips. “Okay,” she said co-operatively, and bending toward her warm upturned russet face somber Humbert pressed his mouth to her fluttering eyelid. She laughed, and brushed past me out of the room. My heart seemed everywhere at once. Never in my life—not even when fondling my child-love in France—never— Night. Never have I experienced such agony. I would like to describe her face, her ways—and I cannot, because my own desire for her blinds me when she is near. I am not used to being with nymphets, damn it. If I close my eyes I see but an immobilized fraction of her, a cinematographic still, a sudden smooth nether loveliness, as with one knee up under her tartan skirt she sits tying her shoe. “Dolores Haze, ne montrez pas vos zhambes ” (this is her mother who thinks she knows French). A poet à mes beures , I composed a madrigal to the soot-black lashes of her pale-gray vacant eyes, to the five asymmetrical freckles of her bobbed nose, to the blond down of her brown limbs; but I tore it up and cannot recall it today. Only in the tritest of terms (diary resumed) can I describe Lo’s features: I might say her hair is auburn, and her lips as red as licked red candy, the lower one prettily plump—oh, that I were a lady writer who could have her pose naked in a naked light! But instead I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows and a queer accent, and a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile. And neither is she the fragile child of a feminine novel. What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet—of every nymphet, perhaps; this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures, from the blurry pinkness of adolescent maidservants in the Old Country (smelling of crushed daisies and sweat); and from very young harlots disguised as children in provincial brothels; and then again, all this gets mixed up with the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping through the musk and the mud, through the dirt and the death, oh God, oh God. And what is most singular is that she, this Lolita, my Lolita, has individualized the writer’s ancient lust, so that above and over everything there is—Lolita.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Only very listlessly did she earn her three pennies—or three nickels—per day; and she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was in her power to deny me certain life-wrecking, strange, slow paradisal philters without which I could not live more than a few days in a row, and which, because of the very nature of love’s languor, I could not obtain by force. Knowing the magic and might of her own soft mouth, she managed—during one schoolyear!—to raise the bonus price of a fancy embrace to three, and even four bucks. O Reader! Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy noisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big silver dollars like some sonorous, jingly and wholly demented machine vomiting riches; and in the margin of that leaping epilepsy she would firmly clutch a handful of coins in her little fist, which, anyway, I used to pry open afterwards unless she gave me the slip, scrambling away to hide her loot. And just as every other day I would cruise all around the school area and on comatose feet visit drugstores, and peer into foggy lanes, and listen to receding girl laughter in between my heart throbs and the falling leaves, so every now and then I would burgle her room and scrutinize torn papers in the wastebasket with the painted roses, and look under the pillow of the virginal bed I had just made myself. Once I found eight one-dollar notes in one of her books (fittingly— Treasure Island) , and once a hole in the wall behind Whistler’s Mother yielded as much as twenty-four dollars and some change—say twenty-four sixty—which I quietly removed, upon which, next day, she accused, to my face, honest Mrs. Holigan of being a filthy thief. Eventually, she lived up to her I.Q. by finding a safer hoarding place which I never discovered; but by that time I had brought prices down drastically by having her earn the hard and nauseous way permission to participate in the school’s theatrical program; because what I feared most was not that she might ruin me, but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away. I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood—or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead. 8 I did my best, your Honor, to tackle the problem of boys. Oh, I used even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called Column for Teens, to find out how to behave! A word to fathers.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She was being forced down, and languidly she let herself droop, until she sat on her heels on the floor, her legs parted slightly, her sex nothing but craving and pain to her. She bowed her head. She feared above all that she would lose control of this mounting pleasure. She would blush, she would pant, she would writhe with it, unable to disguise it from those before her. So she parted her legs, feeling her pubis open and close like a hungry little mouth desperate for satisfaction. Yet she did not care. She had known there would be no release for her. It was enough to feel the rough wool of the carpet against her itching, stinging buttocks, and all life seemed but gradations of pain and pleasure. Her breasts seemed to be tipped with weights, ad she let her head fall to the side, and a great ripple of relaxation ran through her. What more could they do to her with their games, it did not matter. "Do it," she thought, and her eyes melted into tears, the torchlight a glare before her. She looked up. Lady Juliana and the Queen stood side by side, the Queen's arms about Lady Juliana's shoulder. And they were both looking down at Beauty as Lady Juliana unbraided her hair and the little rosebuds fell free at her feet unheeded. The moment seemed to go on forever. Beauty rose to her knees again. She moved silently forward. She bent down with great delicacy and picked up one of the tiny rosebuds in her teeth, and she lifted her head in offering. She felt the rose taken from her. And then the gentle cool kisses of both women. "Very good, my darling," said the Queen with the first true affection. Beauty pressed her lips to their slippers. She heard through her drowsiness the Queen's command that she be taken by the Pages and chained to the wall of the dressing room nearby until morning. "Spread her, and spread her wide," said the Queen. And Beauty knew with a sweet despair that her craving would not for a long time leave her. WITH PRINCE ALEXI THE QUEEN slept surely. Maybe Lady Juliana slept in her arms. The whole castle slept, and beyond it the villages and the towns, the peasants in their cottages and hovels.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill. Oh, my poor Charlotte, do not hate me in your eternal heaven among an eternal alchemy of asphalt and rubber and metal and stone—but thank God, not water, not water! Nonetheless it was a very close shave, speaking quite objectively. And now comes the point of my perfect-crime parable. We sat down on our towels in the thirsty sun. She looked around, loosened her bra, and turned over on her stomach to give her back a chance to be feasted upon. She said she loved me. She sighed deeply. She extended one arm and groped in the pocket of her robe for her cigarettes. She sat up and smoked. She examined her right shoulder. She kissed me heavily with open smoky mouth. Suddenly, down the sand bank behind us, from under the bushes and pines, a stone rolled, then another. “Those disgusting prying kids,” said Charlotte, holding up her big bra to her breast and turning prone again. “I shall have to speak about that to Peter Krestovski.” From the debouchment of the trail came a rustle, a footfall, and Jean Farlow marched down with her easel and things. “You scared us,” said Charlotte. Jean said she had been up there, in a place of green concealment, spying on nature (spies are generally shot), trying to finish a lakescape, but it was no good, she had no talent whatever (which was quite true)—“And have you ever tried painting, Humbert?” Charlotte, who was a little jealous of Jean, wanted to know if John was coming. He was. He was coming home for lunch today. He had dropped her on the way to Parkington and should be picking her up any time now. It was a grand morning. She always felt a traitor to Cavall and Melampus for leaving them roped on such gorgeous days. She sat down on the white sand between Charlotte and me. She wore shorts. Her long brown legs were about as attractive to me as those of a chestnut mare. She showed her gums when she smiled. “I almost put both of you into my lake,” she said. “I even noticed something you overlooked. You [addressing Humbert] had your wrist watch on in, yes, sir, you had.” “ Waterproof,” said Charlotte softly, making a fish mouth. Jean took my wrist upon her knee and examined Charlotte’s gift, then put back Humbert’s hand on the sand, palm up. “You could see anything that way,” remarked Charlotte coquettishly. Jean sighed. “I once saw,” she said, “two children, male and female, at sunset, right here, making love. Their shadows were giants. And I told you about Mr.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  He held her by the shoulders, and then he looked at her swollen breasts. The little brass bells shivered as she breathed. She felt his hands between her legs, and then his fingers inside of her, stroking her in an upward motion that caused her to twist her body with the pleasure of it. "This is all you are to think about, this is all you are to be," he said. "In some former life, you were many things, a lovely face, a lovely voice, an obedient daughter. You've shed that skin as if it were a cloak of dreams, and now you think of these portions of yourself only." He stroked her pubic lips, he widened her vagina. And then he squeezed her breasts almost cruelly. "This is you now, all of you. And your lovely face, only because it is the lovely face of a naked and helpless slave." Then, as if he could not resist, he embraced her and carried her to the bed. "In a little while, I must take wine with the Court, and you will serve me there, demonstrating your obedience to everyone. But that can wait..." "O, yes, my Prince, if it pleases you," she breathed the words so low he might not have heard. She was lying on the jeweled coverlet, and though her buttocks and legs were not as raw as they had been the night before, she felt the painful prickling of the jewels. The Prince knelt over her straddling her, and then opened her mouth with his fingers, and showing her his hard penis, drove it into her mouth with a quick downward motion. She sucked on it, drew on it. Yet all she need do was lie back helpless for he made the strong thrusts himself, into her, and she closed her eyes, smelling the delicious fragrance of his pubic hair, and tasting the saltiness of his skin, the penis nudging the back of her throat again and again as it all but bruised her lips. She was moaning in time with its movements, and when suddenly he drew himself out, she gasped, her hands up to embrace him. But he had lain down on her full length, parted her legs, and pulled away the brass bells. Her pubic lips ached as he did so. He drove into her. She felt herself explode with pleasure, her back arched so rigidly that she lifted his weight with her. Her body was drenched in pleasure. She thrust with her hips in almost a snapping motion, and when he came at last, he gave her cruel thrusts until he lay exhausted. It seemed she slept; she dreamed. And then she heard him say to someone standing there: "Take her away, wash her, adorn her. And send her to me in the upstairs parlor."

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  'Yes, my Princess,' I said and obeyed at once, and then through another hoop and another with the same compliance. I was agile and without the slightest shame, though my penis and balls moved ungracefully with my exertions. "Her blows grew harder, less regular. My moans were very loud and sudden and provoked much laughter. "And when she commanded me now to jump up and grab the bar of the trapeze in both hands, I felt the tears come purely from my stress and exhaustion. I hung from the trapeze as she paddles me, driving me back and forth, and then commanded me to twist and catch the chains above with my feet. "This was quite impossible and as I struggled to obey, the hall echoed with laughter. Felix stepped forward and at once lifted my ankles until I was swinging as she had wished and I had to bear her spanks in this position. "And as soon as she tired of this, I was ordered to drop to the ground, at which point she came forward with a long thin leather strap, and buckling the end of it around my penis, she now pulled me, on my knees towards her. I had never been so led or pulled before, by the very root of my cock, and my tears flowed copiously. My whole body was hot and trembling, and my hips were being tugged ahead of me so that no thought of grace could possibly exist even had I the presence of mind for it. She pulled me to the Queen's feet, and then turning, pulled me along, running on her clicking heels so that I struggled and groaned and cried behind my closed lips to keep up with her. "I was wretched. The circle seemed endless. The strap around my penis constricted it, and my buttocks were so painfully tender now that they ached even when she was not striking them. "But we'd soon completed the circle. I knew she had exhausted her inventiveness. She had relied upon my disobedience and reluctance, and encountering none, her show lacked any real feature save my complete obedience. "But she had now a subtle test for me for which I was unprepared. "She ordered me to stand up, spread my legs and then place my hands flat on the floor before her.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And through the high, narrow window of the dressing room, the sky gave a moon-white light on the wall where Beauty was shackled, her ankles far apart, her wrists spread equally wide apart above her. She lay her head to the side, gazing at the long row of magnificent gowns, the mantles on their hooks, the circlets of gold and embroidery, the beautiful ornamental chains, and heaps upon heaps of lovely slippers. And here she was among these things as if she were but an adornment, a possession, kept with other valuable possessions. She sighed, and she deliberately rubbed her read against the stone wall, wanting somehow to punish it more so that after a few seconds she could feel the relief when she stopped doing this. Her sex would not stop its throbbing. It was sticky with its own wetness. Poor Princess Lizetta in the Hall of Punishments, did she suffer worse than this? At least she was not alone in the darkness, and suddenly even those who must pass her, taunting her, teasing her, stroking her swelling sex, seemed to Beauty a desirable company. She strained and twisted her hips. It was no comfort to her, and she did not understand why she felt this craving when only a little while ago her pain had been so great she had kissed Lady Juliana's slippers. She flushed to think of Lady Juliana's angry words, those reproving spanks that somehow hurt her worse than the others. And how the Pages must have laughed when a dozen Princess had probably played the little gathering game with the roses and done it better. But why, why had Beauty at the very end picked up that last rosebud, and why had she felt her breasts swollen with warmth when Lady Juliana took it from her lips? It had seemed in that moment that Beauty's nipples were cruel little caps that prevented pleasure from breaking loose in her. Strange thought. They seemed too tight for her then, her nipples, and her sex gaped and hungered and the moisture trickled down the inside of her thighs, and when she thought of Prince Alexi's smile, and Lady Juliana's brown eye, and the Prince's beautiful face, and even the Queen, yes, even the Queen's red lips, she felt herself burning in agony. Prince Alexi's sex was thick and dark, like all of him, and his nipples a dark, dark rose color. She tossed her head, rolled it against the wall. But why had she picked up the rose, offered it to pretty Lady Juliana? She stared forward in the darkness, and hearing a creaking sound very near to her, she thought she was imagining it. But in the darkness of the near wall, a seam of light appeared and widened. The door had been opened, and Prince Alexi slipped into the dressing room. Unbound, free, he was standing before her, and very gently, he pushed the door closed behind him. Beauty held her breath.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Those ribald sea monsters. “ Mais allez-y, allez-y! ” Annabel skipping on one foot to get into her shorts, I seasick with rage, trying to screen her. Same date, later, quite late. I have turned on the light to take down a dream. It had an evident antecedent. Haze at dinner had benevolently proclaimed that since the weather bureau promised a sunny weekend we would go to the lake Sunday after church. As I lay in bed, erotically musing before trying to go to sleep, I thought of a final scheme how to profit by the picnic to come. I was aware that mother Haze hated my darling for her being sweet on me. So I planned my lake day with a view to satisfying the mother. To her alone would I talk; but at some appropriate moment I would say I had left my wrist watch or my sunglasses in that glade yonder—and plunge with my nymphet into the wood. Reality at this juncture withdrew, and the Quest for the Glasses turned into a quiet little orgy with a singularly knowing, cheerful, corrupt and compliant Lolita behaving as reason knew she could not possibly behave. At 3 A.M . I swallowed a sleeping pill, and presently, a dream that was not a sequel but a parody revealed to me, with a kind of meaningful clarity, the lake I had never yet visited: it was glazed over with a sheet of emerald ice, and a pockmarked Eskimo was trying in vain to break it with a pickaxe, although imported mimosas and oleanders flowered on its gravelly banks. I am sure Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann would have paid me a sack of schillings for adding such a libidream to her files. Unfortunately, the rest of it was frankly eclectic. Big Haze and little Haze rode on horseback around the lake, and I rode too, dutifully bobbing up and down, bowlegs astraddle although there was no horse between them, only elastic air—one of those little omissions due to the absent-mindedness of the dream agent. Saturday . My heart is still thumping. I still squirm and emit low moans of remembered embarrassment. Dorsal view. Glimpse of shiny skin between T-shirt and white gym shorts. Bending, over a window sill, in the act of tearing off leaves from a poplar outside while engrossed in torrential talk with a newspaper boy below (Kenneth Knight, I suspect) who had just propelled the Ramsdale Journal with a very precise thud onto the porch. I began creeping up to her—“crippling” up to her, as pantomimists say. My arms and legs were convex surfaces between which—rather than upon which—I slowly progressed by some neutral means of locomotion: Humbert the Wounded Spider.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She wanted suddenly to kiss it, but she didn't dare and was shocked at her impulse. He had lifted it free. It was hard. She thought of it between her legs, filling her, rough and too big for her virginal opening, and of that terrible pleasure which had suffused her and wasted her the night before, and she knew she was blushing furiously. "Now go to the stand in the corner," he said, "and bring back the basin with water in it." She almost scurried across the floor. Several times in the Inn he had told her to move fast, and though she had hated it at first, she now did it instinctively. She brought the basin in both hands and set it down. There was a cloth in the water. "Wring out the cloth tightly," he said, "and bathe me quickly." She did as she was told at once, staring in amazement at his sex, its length, its hardness, and the tip of it with its tiny opening. She had been so sore from it yesterday, yet that pleasure had paralyzed her. Never had she guessed at such a secret. "Now, do you know what I want of you?" the Prince said gently. His had lovingly stroked her cheek, lifting her hair back. She ached to look at him. She wished so much he would command her to look into his eyes. It terrified her, but after the first instant it was so wondrous to her, his expression, that handsome and almost delicate face, and those black eyes that seemed to accept no compromise. "No, my Prince, but whatever it is..." she started. "Yes, darling...you are being very good. I want you to take it in your mouth, stroke it with your tongue and your lips." She was shocked. She had never thought of this. She thought suddenly, cruelly of who she had been, a Princess, and she thought of all her young life before she had fallen asleep, and she almost gave a little whimper. But this was her Prince who was commanding her, not some dreadful person she was being given to as a wife who might have demanded this of her. She closed her eyes and took it into her mouth, feeling its huge size, its hardness. It nudged at the back of her throat, and she pushed up and down on it as the Prince guided her. The taste of it was almost delicious; and it seemed a salty liquid in tiny droplets came out into her mouth, and then she stopped because he had said it was enough. She opened her eyes. "Very good, Beauty, very good," said the Prince. And she could tell he was in pain with his need suddenly. It made her fell proud, and there was in her, even in her helplessness, a sense of power.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Prince Alexi," Beauty thought. It was a lovely name, and he too was of royal blood and high birth. Why, of course, all of them were. It was a delightful thought. What if they had not been, and she were the only Princess? She stared at his buttocks. There were obvious welts on them and little patches that seemed much redder than the rest, and as the young slave Prince kissed the Queen's feet, Beauty could see also his scrotum between his legs, dark, hairy and mysterious. It struck her how dreadfully vulnerable he seemed, being a boy, in ways she had never considered. But he had been released or forgiven. He rose to his feet, and brushed his auburn curly hair out of his eyes and back from his cheek, and she saw his face stained with tears, and reddened too; yet he had about him a marvelous dignity. He took the pitcher handed him without complaint and gracefully he moved among the standing guests, filling their goblets. He was only a few paces from Beauty, and drawing ever closer. And she could hear how the men and women teased him. "Another paddling and you are so wretchedly clumsy," said a very tall blond-haired Lady in a long green gown, with diamonds on her fingers, and she pinched his red cheek, as, with his eyes down, he smiled. His penis was hard and erect as before, rising up thick and motionless from a nest of dark curly hair between his legs. Beauty could not stop herself from looking at it. As he came nearer, she held her breath. "Come here, Prince Alexi," said the Lord with the gray eyes. He snapped his fingers. And then taking a white handkerchief, he had the boy moisten it with the wine. The boy was so near now Beauty might have touched him. And the Lord took the moistened handkerchief and pressed it to Beauty's lips. It felt good and cool and tantalizing. But she could not help but look up at the obedient boy Prince who stood waiting, and she saw him looking at her. And though his face was still slightly pink, and there were tears on his cheeks, he smiled at her. THE PRINCE'S BED CHAMBER BEAUTY AWOKE to new terror. It was getting dusk; the Feast was over. The Lords and Ladies who remained were very loud and swept up in the fever of the afternoon, but she was being unbound and she did not know what would now happen to her.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Put your face in her lap," he said, "and your arms about her." Beauty gasped and sat up, but Prince Alexi obeyed immediately. Beauty looked down to see his auburn hair covering her sex as she felt his lips against her thighs, and his arms enclose her. His body was hot and pulsing; she could feel the beating of his heart, and without meaning to, she reached out to clasp his hips with her hands. The Prince kicked Prince Alexi's legs wide apart and taking Beauty's head roughly in his left hand so that he might kiss her, he drove his organ into Prince Alexi's anus. Prince Alexi moaned at the roughness and swiftness of the thrusts. Beauty felt the pressure against her as Prince Alexi was driven ever more quickly by it. The Prince had let her go, and she was crying. She held tight to Prince Alexi, and then the Prince gave his final thrust with a moan, his hands pressed to Prince Alexi's back, and he stood still letting his pleasure course through him. Beauty tried to keep herself quiet. Prince Alexi let her go, but not without a secret little kiss between her legs right on the crest of her pubic hair, and just as he was being drawn away, again, his dark eyes narrowed in a secret smile for her. "Mount him in the passage," said the Prince to the Squire. "And see no one satisfies him. Keep him in torment. Every quarter of the hour remind him of his duty to his Prince, but do not satisfy him." Prince Alexi was taken away. Beauty sat staring at the open door. But it was not over. The Prince reached out and taking her by the hair, told her to follow him. "On your hands and knees, my dear. That is always the way you will move through the castle," he said, "unless told otherwise." She hurried along, following him out and to the edge of the stairway. Halfway down was a broad landing from which one might see directly into the Great Hall. And on the landing was a stone statue that frightened Beauty. It was a pagan god of some sort with an erect phallus. It was onto this phallus that Prince Alexi was now thrust, his legs bound apart on the pedestal of the statue. His head was laid back on the statue's shoulder. He gave another moan as the phallus impaled him and then he lay still as Squire Felix bound his hands behind his back.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Yes, especially as I can’t stay very long with you. I’m forced to go on to old Madame Vrede. I’ve been promising to go for a century,” said Anna, to whom lying, alien as it was to her nature, had become not merely simple and natural in society, but a positive source of satisfaction. Why she said this, which she had not thought of a second before, she could not have explained. She had said it simply from the reflection that as Vronsky would not be here, she had better secure her own freedom, and try to see him somehow. But why she had spoken of old Madame Vrede, whom she had to go and see, as she had to see many other people, she could not have explained; and yet, as it afterwards turned out, had she contrived the most cunning devices to meet Vronsky, she could have thought of nothing better. “No. I’m not going to let you go for anything,” answered Betsy, looking intently into Anna’s face. “Really, if I were not fond of you, I should feel offended. One would think you were afraid my society would compromise you. Tea in the little dining-room, please,” she said, half closing her eyes, as she always did when addressing the footman. Taking the note from him, she read it. “Alexey’s playing us false,” she said in French; “he writes that he can’t come,” she added in a tone as simple and natural as though it could never enter her head that Vronsky could mean anything more to Anna than a game of croquet. Anna knew that Betsy knew everything, but, hearing how she spoke of Vronsky before her, she almost felt persuaded for a minute that she knew nothing. “Ah!” said Anna indifferently, as though not greatly interested in the matter, and she went on smiling: “How can you or your friends compromise anyone?” This playing with words, this hiding of a secret, had a great fascination for Anna, as, indeed, it has for all women. And it was not the necessity of concealment, not the aim with which the concealment was contrived, but the process of concealment itself which attracted her. “I can’t be more Catholic than the Pope,” she said. “Stremov and Liza Merkalova, why, they’re the cream of the cream of society. Besides, they’re received everywhere, and _I_”—she laid special stress on the I—“have never been strict and intolerant. It’s simply that I haven’t the time.” “No; you don’t care, perhaps, to meet Stremov? Let him and Alexey Alexandrovitch tilt at each other in the committee—that’s no affair of ours. But in the world, he’s the most amiable man I know, and a devoted croquet player. You shall see. And, in spite of his absurd position as Liza’s lovesick swain at his age, you ought to see how he carries off the absurd position. He’s very nice. Sappho Shtoltz you don’t know? Oh, that’s a new type, quite new.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and how to do it, without impinging on a child’s chastity; after all, I had had some experience in my life of pederosis; had visually possessed dappled nymphets in parks; had wedged my wary and bestial way into the hottest, most crowded corner of a city bus full of strap-hanging school children. But for almost three weeks I had been interrupted in all my pathetic machinations. The agent of these interruptions was usually the Haze woman (who, as the reader will mark, was more afraid of Lo’s deriving some pleasure from me than of my enjoying Lo). The passion I had developed for that nymphet—for the first nymphet in my life that could be reached at last by my awkward, aching, timid claws—would have certainly landed me again in a sanatorium, had not the devil realized that I was to be granted some relief if he wanted to have me as a plaything for some time longer. The reader has also marked the curious Mirage of the Lake. It would have been logical on the part of Aubrey McFate (as I would like to dub that devil of mine) to arrange a small treat for me on the promised beach, in the presumed forest. Actually, the promise Mrs. Haze had made was a fraudulent one: she had not told me that Mary Rose Hamilton (a dark little beauty in her own right) was to come too, and that the two nymphets would be whispering apart, and playing apart, and having a good time all by themselves, while Mrs. Haze and her handsome lodger conversed sedately in the seminude, far from prying eyes. Incidentally, eyes did pry and tongues did wag. How queer life is! We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo. Before my actual arrival, my landlady had planned to have an old spinster, a Miss Phalen, whose mother had been cook in Mrs. Haze’s family, come to stay in the house with Lolita and me, while Mrs. Haze, a career girl at heart, sought some suitable job in the nearest city. Mrs. Haze had seen the whole situation very clearly: the bespectacled, round-backed Herr Humbert coming with his Central-European trunks to gather dust in his corner behind a heap of old books; the unloved ugly little daughter firmly supervised by Miss Phalen who had already once had my Lo under her buzzard wing (Lo recalled that 1944 summer with an indignant shudder); and Mrs. Haze herself engaged as a receptionist in a great elegant city. But a not too complicated event interfered with that program. Miss Phalen broke her hip in Savannah, Ga., on the very day I arrived in Ramsdale .

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "She ordered me to rise, and a Page appeared, I don't remember if it was Felix, and he manacled my hands together over my head so that my toes barely touched the ground. The Queen seated herself right in front of me. She laid the phallus rod aside and lifted yet another rod that had been chained to her girdle. It was merely a long thin strip of wood covered with leather. "'Now you must talk to me,' she said. 'You must address me as your Highness, and you must answer my questions respectfully.' I felt an almost uncontrollable excitement at this. I would be allowed to speak to her. Of course I never had. In my rebelliousness I had always been gagged, and I did not know how I would feel when allowed words. I was her puppy dog, her mute slave, and now I must speak to her. She toyed with my penis; she lifted my balls on her thin leather stick and pushed them to and fro. She gave my thighs a playful smack. "'Did you enjoy serving the crude Lords and Ladies of the kitchen?' she asked me playfully, 'or would you rather serve your Queen?' "'I want to serve only you, your Highness, or as you wish.' I answered quickly. My own voice sounded strange to me. It was mine, but I had not heard it in so long, and when I voiced this subservience it was as if I had only just discovered it. Or rather I discovered it anew, and it produced an extraordinary outpouring of emotion in me. I wept, and hoped that it did not displease her. "She rose then and stood very close to me. She touched my eyes and my lips. 'All this belongs to me,' she said, 'and this,' and she touched the nipples of my chest which the kitchen boys had never spared, and she touched my belly and my navel. 'And this,' she said, 'this too, belongs to me,' and she held my penis in her hand, her long nails scratching at the tip of it gently. It gave off a little fluid then and she withdrew her hand and held my scrotum in her hands and claimed that as well. 'Spread your legs,' she said and turned me on the chain that held me. 'And this is mine,' she said, touching my anus. "I heard myself answer her, 'Yes, your Highness.' She then told me she had punishments worse, for me than the kitchen should I ever try to escape her again, or rebel or in any way displease her. But for the time being, she would be more than pleased with me, she was certain, and she would work me hard as was her pleasure. She said I had great strength for her sport which Prince Gerald had not, and she would test that strength to the limit. "Each morning, she would spank me on the Bridle Path.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  The young men had softly curly hair, cut at the shoulders and neatly combed so that it framed their lean faces. And never did they raise their eyes, though some seemed to move in obvious discomfort from the hardness of their penises. How she could tell this discomfort, she was not sure; it was their manner, a manner of bearing tension and desire, with no expression for it. And as she saw the first of the long-haired girls bending over the table with her pitcher, she wondered if she too felt this same softly agonizing pleasure. Beauty felt it now just looking at these slaves, and she felt a quiet relief that for a moment she herself was unobserved. Or so she thought. Because she could sense a restlessness in the room. Some were rising and walking about, perhaps even dancing to the music. She could not be sure. And others had gone to gather near the Queen, their goblets in hand, regaling the Prince it seemed with stories. The Prince. She caught a clear glimpse of him and he smiled at her. How regal he looked, his black hair glossy and full, his long, shining white boots stretched out on the blue carpet before him. He was nodding and smiling to those who addressed him, but now and then his eyes moved to Beauty. But there was so much to see, and now she felt someone was very near her, and touching her again, and she realized that a line of dancers was just forming to one side of her. There was a reckless air to things. Much wine was being poured. There were great eruptions of laughter. And then, quite suddenly, she saw far to her left a young naked boy drop his pitcher of wine, and the red liquid run out on the floor as the others hastened to clean it. At once the Lord at Beauty's side clapped his hands, and Beauty saw three exquisitely dressed Pages, no older than the naked boys themselves, rush forward and seize the boy and hold him up quickly by his ankles. This brought a loud round of applause from those Lords and Ladies nearest the boy, and at once a paddle was produced, a very beautiful piece of gold enameling and white tracery, and the offender was smartly spanked while all looked on with the greatest fascination. Beauty felt a fluttering in her heart. If she were to be humiliated like that, punished so immediately and ignominiously for clumsiness, she didn't know how she could bear it. To be displayed was one thing; here she had some grace.