Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
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do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
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My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.
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The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
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The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
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I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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Life with you was lovely—and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink ‘v’ in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering ‘l.’ Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too.
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My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
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The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.
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A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
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All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
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Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!
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Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being - not a constant state - that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden.
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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
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Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
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...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
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I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.
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I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
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I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.