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Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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The work of art is invariably the creation of a new world.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.
Vladimir Nabokov
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All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
Vladimir Nabokov
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And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an american businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.
Vladimir Nabokov
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This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious.
Vladimir Nabokov
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That life-quickening atmosphere of a big railway station where everything is something trembling on the brink of something else.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
Vladimir Nabokov
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It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
Vladimir Nabokov
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We can at last describe his tie, an Easter gift from a dressy butcher, his brother in law in Onhava: imitation silk, colour chocolate brown barred with red, the end tucked into the shirt between the second and third buttons - a Zemblan fashion of the ninteen thirties.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their nature, which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as "nymphets."
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IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT SCENES ONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE FILMED Shakespeare in the part of the King's Ghost. The beheading of Louis the Sixteenth, the drums drowning his speech on the scaffold. Herman Melville at breakfast, feeling a sardine to his cat. Poe's wedding. Lewis Carroll's picnics. The Russians leaving Alaska, delighted with the deal. Shot of a seal applauding.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw.
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Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!
Vladimir Nabokov
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The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.
Vladimir Nabokov
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To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and nature. Every writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.
Vladimir Nabokov
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But that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since." "this then is my story. i have reread it. it has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. at this or that twist of it i feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than i care to probe.
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Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
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And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
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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