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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Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.
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In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one si...
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Happy the man, and happy he alone,
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I was very young when I saw 'Gone With the Wind,' but I fell in love with Clark Gable. And w...
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It is a lie.
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Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
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A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the ...
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The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliatio...
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Happy is he who bears a god within.
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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. ...
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It was a good, productive meeting. He is entertaining and well-informed. I was quite happy to see he...
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She did not think it was love. She did not think it was love when she felt a curious ache and anxiet...
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I'm a novelist. Anything you say can be taken down and used against you in a work of fiction.
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ot everyone liked Albert. Not everyone was happy that he had become the most important person around...
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Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculous...
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He said he would get a letter out to students seven weeks ago and we have not received it yet.
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When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. H...
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A.J. is a shooter. When he shoots the puck he manages to squeeze it between players. The puck just j...
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A man lives with an interest in life to crave for like of others for self-love only, but if he raves...
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He was in there supporting the lads, he was as happy as anyone afterwards and when he is back he wil...
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Naturally, I don?t like (the vandalism). Police sent one boy over and when it gets warmer he is goin...
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When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembe...
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He went over on his ankle quite badly but, nevertheless, we were quite happy to put the young goalke...
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A love letter lost in the mail, forgotten, miss delivered and then discovered years later and receiv...
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It was a mess. There was water everywhere. But he was so happy. It took him all day to wash three pl...
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Together, in that room, our childhood notions of love melted away. We discovered love was not a fair...
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When he wrote a letter, he would put that which was most material in the postscript, as if it had be...
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He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike pur...
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He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.
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There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage f...
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Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.
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Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly rec...
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
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I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes
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Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
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Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
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It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
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Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom.
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
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I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn s...
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It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
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Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, f...
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The tiny madman in his padded cell.
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and ...
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Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event,...
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. -...
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Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
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Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.
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Solitude is the playfield of Satan. - Pale Fire, 1962.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
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Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
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It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to ...
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Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to en...
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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
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The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
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To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of...
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Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
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A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the read...
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For m...
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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
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Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the h...
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Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss som...
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Caress the detail, the divine detail.
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack o...
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Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
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A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his ...
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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
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He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, t...
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I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
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Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme met...
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Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
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The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling ...
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before bein...
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There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
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The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in in...
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I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
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Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
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I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of he...
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Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me.
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My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
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A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the st...
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There was no Lo to behold.
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I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
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Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Har...
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She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. Sh...
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He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, tr...
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Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily ap...
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The distinct feature of everything extant is its monotony.
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We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives...
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Words without experience are meaningless.
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I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
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All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I...
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Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or ...
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How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human ...
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Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—En...
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Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity...
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Lolita
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I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that liter...
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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
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I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their l...
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A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exa...
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I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more ...
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And the rest is rust and stardust.
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I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with
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Dear Jesus, do something.
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We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imag...
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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words
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My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the mos...
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
My sin, my soul.
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the to...
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Caress the detail, the divine detail
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow
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It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up...
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To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of...
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Other men die; but I Am not another; therefore I'll not die
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Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the first - a dull man writing broken English, the second - ...
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For me, a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic b...
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
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Solitude is the play field of Satan
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[Against whom was it turned? Against whom did he conspire?] Tum-tee-tum. And once more - TUM! ... I ...
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The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack o...
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I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
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The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in in...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
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- A sentyment staje się uciążliwy. W końcu jest coś nazbyt fizycznego w próbie zachowania czą...
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Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, ban...
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It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to ...
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She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You must be careful. There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, hap...
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Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness....
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Good by-aye!" she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in k...
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You have to be an artist and a madman...
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You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
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She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. Sh...
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All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of partin...
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He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those...
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Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poiso...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Ink, a Drug.
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I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything i...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the sa...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
But even in such works where the author is ideally unobtrusive, he remains diffused through the book...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A wave would arrive, all out of breath, but, as it had nothing to report, it would disperse in apolo...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to s...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I can only explain my behaviour then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a derang...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that liter...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You couldn't get more original than Laura. Laura. Yes, she was an original, all right. One of a kind...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The color of one's creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in ti...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anythin...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
but that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remain...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a si...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me - not by way of protest, not as a s...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sen...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bl...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very well do with a little rest in this subd...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
My little cup brims with tiddles.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal v...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed betwe...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lolita, luz de mi vida, fuego de mis entrañas. Pecado mío, alma mía. Lo-li-ta: la punta de la len...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon wh...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs throu...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable na...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze
I cannot get out, said the starling
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruin...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I would see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV