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6c0f531
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It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
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love
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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bb27ef6
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And the rest is rust and stardust.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4a091bd
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of ..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4b1054f
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He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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288ffb9
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Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a4c23b1
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Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.
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relationship
life
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f5951cf
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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172051f
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Words without experience are meaningless.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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bc2ff68
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I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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7fac71f
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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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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e777d70
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She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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46b947f
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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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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9f6922e
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I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ad37329
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Some people--and I am one of them--hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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fd04342
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Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him."
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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77c308c
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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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2e4fefe
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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.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c524670
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I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t'aimais, je t'aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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1d4828a
|
Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
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seasons
life
spring
desire
wanderlust
nostalgia
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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32387c2
|
You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs--the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limbs, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate--the ..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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65f985d
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Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0458ade
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Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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2fa01d2
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And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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edc1acf
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I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. [...] Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that w..
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friendship
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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85a0292
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I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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cf6a3f7
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Dear Jesus, do something.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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1aa5e44
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Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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24fe16b
|
We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.
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life
lolita
nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a20398d
|
I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her -after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred-I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever-for all the world a littl..
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sex
feelings
romance
love
brutal
descriptive
lust
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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1d1fb1a
|
We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night -- every night, every night -- the moment I feigned sleep.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9cd6915
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All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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8f4a4b2
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We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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937499e
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Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet. Age: five thousand three hundred days. Profession: none, or "starlet" Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze? Why are you hiding, darling? (I Talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling). Where are you riding, Dolores Haze? What make is the magic carpet? Is a Cream Cougar the present craze? And where are you parked, my car pet? Who is your hero, Dolores Haze? Sti..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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2048dff
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I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
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humble
hubris
modesty
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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914369a
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You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0dabf4e
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Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d499378
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You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ff9b7f0
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Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise - a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames - but still a paradise.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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3bca083
|
And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski; ..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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7d48395
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One is always at home in one's past...
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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504949c
|
Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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humorous
insprirational
|
vladimir nabokov |
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3b2e123
|
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.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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bccaff4
|
We are most artistically caged.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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5dd01cf
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Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
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Vladimir Nabokov |