Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone save her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity.
Quotes to Explore
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I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths for life for myself; it's for that reason that I went to war, and for that reason I volunteered.
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I don't like the word 'experiment' in the context of art in general. It implies something immature, unfinished, something entertaining for a moment before it becomes irrelevant.
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I voted for Barack Obama.
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Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as 'a wise Latina' trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment - a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism.
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This is something I've wanted to do my whole life is play baseball, and I think just the opportunity to put on a big-league uniform every day is just... you know, people dream of it, but not everybody gets to do it. I'm thankful every day I get to do it.
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People just decided I was an R&B artist because I'm black.
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Sometimes your parents are the ones with the biggest mouths of all time.
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I want to be able to make people laugh and cry and feel happy or sad and feel all these different emotions through singing and acting. Hopefully throughout my career, I'll get to pursue them.
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I'm brilliant at cooking my stepmother's scrambled egg recipe. The secret is to put eggs, butter, milk, and seasoning together in the saucepan, and to keep stirring with a wooden spoon under a low heat until the preferred consistency is reached.
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Black women as a group have never been fools. We couldn't afford to be.
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I live in a bus and go from place to place and sometimes feel very detached from what's going on.
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The loneliest, most down-on-his-luck person can have a dog who adores him. The most bitter, sour person can light up with joy when he sees his dog. It is magical and, as 'The Dog Master' reveals, it is biological - we evolved together.
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My mother took great relish in introducing me as 'This is my son - he's a doctor but not the kind that helps people.'
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I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I'm trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.
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A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.
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Our culture is at its best when we protect and encourage the weakest. Every life - at every stage, in every place - has a dignity beyond our imagining.
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French men can be very tough too, you know... Real bad boys move in silence, as we know, so you don't have to be loud and muscular to be scary, actually.
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I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
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Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing 'mere' about symbols.
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For example, I loved English and history at school. I would have loved to have done a degree in either. But my Mom said I didn't have time for university.
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The Stars. Jared slept beneath them, uneasy in the rustling leaves. From the battlements Finn gazed up at them, seeing the impossible distances between galaxies and nebulae, and thinking they were not as wide as the distances between people. In the study Claudia sensed them, in the sparks and crackles on the screen. In the prison, Attia dreamt of them, She sat curled on the hard chair, Rix repacking his hidden pockets obsessively with coins and glass discs and hidden handkerchiefs. A single spark flickered deep in the coin Keiro spun and caught, spun and caught.
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All religions begin with the cry Help.
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She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone save her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity.
