“Lolita represents a different cultural type than her ancestors. She is not just an adolescent girl on her way to womanhood but a new specimen of humanity whose progeny will embody a historically unparalleled strain of youthfulness, even in their old age. In that sense we all share Lolita’s age.”
More from Robert Pogue Harrison
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“We have never before been so young, nor so old.”
“Language does not arise from a need to escape but from a desire to enter, not from frowns…”