"We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo."
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Quote collection
Vladimir Nabokov quotes (page 15 of 19)
364 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"My answer to your question'Does the writer have a social responsibility?' is NO.You owe me ten cents, sir."
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"Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk."
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"Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity"
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"Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical."
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"Ada girl, adored girl, [...] I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended."
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"She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward first the scepter of my passion."
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"Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds."
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"When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - "hoping that I like the book as much as he does" - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang."
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"You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go."
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"for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word."
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"I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine."
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"In reading, one should notice and fondle details."
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"I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert."
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"When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past."
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"The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car."
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"Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl."
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"We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break."
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"Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the a.non.y.muse roller that passed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap."
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"The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading"
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