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Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena — all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.
Vladimir Nabokov
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For better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison.
Vladimir Nabokov
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With the help of the janitor he screwed onto the side of the desk a pencil sharpener—that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of categories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.
Vladimir Nabokov
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And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: "O rainbow-colored gods...
Vladimir Nabokov
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The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.
Vladimir Nabokov
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
Vladimir Nabokov
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My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.
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While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
Vladimir Nabokov
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No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I am sentimental,' she said. 'I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.
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The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.
Vladimir Nabokov
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What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?
Vladimir Nabokov
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A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I never imagined that I should be able to live by my writing, but now I am kept by a little girl named Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
Vladimir Nabokov
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While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Quote of the day
Guilt is anger directed at ourselves - at what we did or did not do. Resentment is anger directed at others - at what they did or did not do.
Peter McWilliams
Vladimir Nabokov
Born:
April 22, 1899
Died:
July 2, 1977
(aged 78)
Bio:
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian-American novelist. His first nine novels were in Russian, and he achieved international prominence after he began writing English prose.
Known for:
Lolita (1955)
Pale Fire (1962)
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969)
The Gift (1952)
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