Like many other people, I'm sure, I've noticed that Nabokov has an incredible ability for saying a lot with very few words. An example that sticks out occurs during the sex scene in The Enchanter (on my page 74).
"...[S]he shielded herself with her sharp little elbow, tearing from his grasp and still yelling senselessly, and somebody was pounding on the wall, demanding inconceivable silence."
It took me a while to wrap my head around the idea of "inconceivable silence." Those words together reveal so much about both the frame of mind of each character in that moment. He is wrapped up in the "noise" of being caught, and she is wrapped up in the "noise" of the shock of the situation, and all of this is soundtracked by her shrieking and his desperate attempts to quiet her. Of course silence would be the furthest thing from either of their minds, and we get a sense of that in only two words.
Also striking about "inconceivable silence" is how it fits into the "poetry" of that sentence. The whole bit's repetition of S sounds makes it stand out against the rest of the scene. It evokes something of a "hissing" in the mind's ear, fitting for the fallout of such a devious moment in time, particularly one so heavily influenced by a snakelike part of the male anatomy.
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