"Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations."
"A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle."
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Source: Vladimir Nabokov (2017). “Lectures on Literature”, p.6, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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"And the rest is rust and stardust."
"Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards."
"Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom."
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