"Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations."
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Quote collection
Vladimir Nabokov quotes (page 1 of 19)
364 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"And the rest is rust and stardust."
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"Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards."
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"Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom."
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"Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars."
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"Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form."
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"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."
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"The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them."
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"There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion."
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"A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence."
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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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"Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness."
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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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"I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais!"
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"A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own."
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"Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again."
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"The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea."
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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."
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"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible."
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"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane."
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