"Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know."
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Quote collection
Vladimir Nabokov quotes (page 9 of 19)
364 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely."
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"Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James."
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"The lost glove is happy."
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"He broke my heart. You merely broke my life."
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"All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so."
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"We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives."
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"My own ultraviolet darling. " Lolita"
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"Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry."
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"but that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since." "this then is my story. i have reread it. it has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. at this or that twist of it i feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than i care to probe."
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"No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has."
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"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
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"Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives."
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"I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations."
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"I don't think in any language. I think in images."
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"You lose your immortality when you lose your memory."
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"The square root of I is I."
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"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual."
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"Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies."
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"Although I do not care for the slogan "art for art's sake", there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art."
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