Describing his first road trip with Lolita across the USA, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions R. L. Stevenson’s footprint on an extinct volcano:
According to Kinbote (in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), Sybil Shade (the poet's wife) used to call him “an elephantine tick; a king-sized botfly; a macaco worm; the monstrous parasite of a genius:”
When Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) murders Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer who abducted Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital), the latter throws back his head in a howl:
Describing his first road trip with Lolita across the USA, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, “too prehistoric for words” (blasé Lo):
Describing his state of mind after Lolita's escape from the Elphinstone hospital, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions his daymares and insomnias:
During her second road trip across the USA with Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) Lolita falls ill and on Tuesday, June 28, 1949, is hospitalized in Elphinstone (a small town in the Rocky Mountains):
According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955), in a moment of metaphysical curiosity he had turned over a Protestant’s drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure:
In his commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) quotes the beginning of a sonnet that Conmal (the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) composed directly in English:
A character in VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937), the writer Shirin is blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot (slep kak Mil'ton, glukh kak Betkhoven i glup kak beton):
