Gnostical Turpitude

A few more "underscores" from Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading:

  • Accused of the most terrible crimes, gnostical turpitude
  • Again a butterfly wing would slide between his fingers, leaving colored powder on them
  • the bliss of relieving oneself, which some hold to be on a par with the pleasure of love
  • Around his left nipple there was an imaginative tattoo--two green leaves--so that the nipple itself seemed to be a rosebud (made of marchpane and candied angelica)
  • flashed by so quickly as happens only amid very familiar surroundings, in the dark, when the varicolored fractions of day are replaced by the integers of night

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