"Nymphets do not occur in polar regions."
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Quote collection
Vladimir Nabokov quotes (page 16 of 19)
364 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child."
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"Perhaps if the year was 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer."
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"while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."
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"I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with."
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"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."
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"I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art."
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"I think it is all a matter of love."
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"How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!"
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"While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster."
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"Solitude was corrupting me."
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"There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction...For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."
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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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"There was no Lo to behold."
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"My little cup brims with tiddles."
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"Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future."
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"He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has."
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"Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from Terra-these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known . . . this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me."
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"I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die."
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"...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples."
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