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And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.
Vladimir Nabokov -
Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
Vladimir Nabokov -
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Vladimir Nabokov -
You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
Vladimir Nabokov -
Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
Vladimir Nabokov -
No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.
Vladimir Nabokov -
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
Vladimir Nabokov -
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.
Vladimir Nabokov -
Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
Vladimir Nabokov -
My little cup brims with tiddles.
Vladimir Nabokov -
The lost glove is happy.
Vladimir Nabokov -
Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
Vladimir Nabokov -
if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
Vladimir Nabokov -
All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.
Vladimir Nabokov -
My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
Vladimir Nabokov -
Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
Vladimir Nabokov -
A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
Vladimir Nabokov
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Vladimir Nabokov -
Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
Vladimir Nabokov -
Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).
Vladimir Nabokov -
To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena - all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.
Vladimir Nabokov