"I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel."
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Quote collection
Vladimir Nabokov quotes (page 14 of 19)
364 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past."
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"I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past."
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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. . ."
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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."
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"The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning."
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"All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me."
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"And what is death, if not a face at peace - its artistic perfection."
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"I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings."
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"And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion."
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"If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name."
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"Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?"
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"I think she always nursed a small mad hope."
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"I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. ... I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita."
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"Do those clowns really believe what they teach?"
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"Memory overshadows the present and dims the future "into something thicker than its usual pea soup.""
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"I have no ear for music. When I attend a concert, I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians."
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"Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés."
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"There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me."
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"Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them."
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