"I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more."
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Quote collection
Vladimir Nabokov quotes (page 4 of 19)
364 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Genius is finding the invisible link between things."
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"The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before."
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"Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval."
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"There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius."
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"The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind."
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"Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic."
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"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."
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"Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me."
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"Alas! In vain historians pry and probe: The same wind blows, and in the same live robe Truth bends her head to fingers curved cupwise; And with a woman's smile and a child's care Examines something she is holding there Concealed by her own shoulder from our eyes."
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"I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist."
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"There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity."
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"He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle."
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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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"Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm."
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"There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling."
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"All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs."
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"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass Hang all the furniture above the grass, And how delightful when a fall of snow Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so As to make chair and bed exactly stand Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!"
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"Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity."
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"Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity."
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