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5be803d
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But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets it rolling, doomed never again to stop?
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soul
memory
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c466cd7
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From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment.
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sentiment
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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00e8c76
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I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for the look of lust always is gloomy; lust is never quite sure--even when the velvety victim is locked up in one's dungeon--that some rival devil or influential god may still not abolish one's prepared triumph.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0c5422f
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If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece. Line
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6e550a0
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The weather this morning was so-so: dullish, but warm, a boiled-milk sky, with skin- but if you pushed it aside with a teaspoon, the sun was really nice, so I wore my white trousers.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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3befce9
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No free man needs a God; but was I free?
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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8d0e37c
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All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.
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irony
humor
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a1b1b7e
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The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: "First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull." Kinbote: "You appreciate particularly the purple passages?" Shade: "Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane."
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0ee66d1
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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. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whate..
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fate
shakespeare
literature
friends
literary-references
lolita
vladimir-nabokov
emma-bovary
madame-bovary
gustave-flaubert
king-lear
expectations
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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1b0d06a
|
az ostobasag ugyanis mindig a zsufoltsag szinonimaja, es semmi sincs jobban tele, mint egy ures fej.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c63d19d
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a shoe-shaped bath tub, within which I felt like Marat but with no white-necked maiden to stab me.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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fa24f7c
|
There is yet another reason why I cannot, nor wish to, believe in God: the fairy tale about him is not really mine, it belongs to strangers, to all men; it is soaked through by the evil-smelling effluvia of millions of other souls that have spun about a little under the sun and then burst...
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god
atheism
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b06e46f
|
The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund's last breath.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e15c06b
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In those years, that marvelous mess of constellations, nebulae, interstellar gaps and all the rest of the awesome show provoked in me an indescribable sense of nausea, of utter panic, as if I were hanging from earth upside down on the brink of infinite space, with terrestrial gravity still holding me by the heels but about to release me any moment
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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65790a8
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With your little claws, Lolita.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f9509e5
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Nincs tobb pusztitas, Van. Csak szerelem.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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068ee06
|
Now, when it was too late, and Life's shops were closed, he regretted not having bought a certain book he had always wanted; never having gone through an earthquake, a fire, a train accident; never having seen Tatsienlu in Tibet, or heard blue magpies chattering in Chinese willows; not having spoken to that errant schoolgirl with shameless eyes, met one day in a lonely glade; not having laughed at the poor little joke of a shy ugly woman, w..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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01f14f3
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This twinned twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world's socket. Through peacocked lashes I saw the dazzling diamond reflection of the low sun on the round back of a parked automobile. To all kinds of things a vivid picto..
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winter
street-scene
street
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f10aa77
|
To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms -- some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh.
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pain
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d3856ac
|
Vladimir Nabokov "... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this ..
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literature
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b753591
|
Paduk and all the rest wrote on steadily, but Krug's failure was complete, a baffling and hideous disaster, for he had been busy becoming an elderly man instead of learning the simple but now unobtainable passages which they, mere boys, had memorized.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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02ddd66
|
I also know that the shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c35ef8b
|
Cynthia had been on friendly terms with an eccentric librarian called Porlock who in the last years of his dusty life had been engaged in examining old books for miraculous misprints such as the substitution of "1" for the second "h" in the word "hither." Contrary to Cynthia, he cared nothing for the thrill of obscure predictions; all he sought was the freak itself, the chance that mimics choice, the flaw that looks like a flower; and Cynth..
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words
missprint
mistake
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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168b2a9
|
at night, in his drugged sleep, something more significant would burst through. Together with naked Martha, he would be sawing off the head of Piffke in a public toilet, even though in the first place he was undistinguishable from the Dreyers' dead chauffeur, and in the second, was called Dreyer in the language of dreams. Horror and helpless revulsion merged in those nightmares with a certain nonterrestrial sensation, known to those who hav..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4f50812
|
I do not want, John. You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d7612f0
|
I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as i..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f9b5c5b
|
The cup-sized breasts of that twenty-four year old impatient beauty seemed a dozen years younger than she, with those pale squinty nipples and firm form.
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the-original-of-laura
vladimir-nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0e4c33d
|
eventually, however, a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down - possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0c1a21e
|
S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.
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weak
imagination
cupid
left-handed
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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03fefaa
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How many were the aquarelles she painted for me; what a revelation it was when she showed me the lilac tree that grows out of mixed blue and red! Sometimes, in our St Petersburg house, from a secret compartment in the wall of her dressing room (and my birth room), she would produce a mass of jewelry for my bedtime amusement. I was very small then, and those flashing tiaras and chokers and rings seemed to me hardly inferior in mystery and en..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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71ce9b9
|
This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My Calender is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don't think I can go on. Heart, head--everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat til page is full, printer.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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fc89d02
|
wszystko, co budzi zachwyt wywolany wiecznym zblizaniem sie do celu, czeka zaglada.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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be56919
|
in a livid wet dress, under the tumbling mist... had run ecstatically up that ridge above Moulinet to be felled there by a thunderbolt.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ed31329
|
Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart.
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writing-advice
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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702e807
|
Elmenni annyi, mint kicsit meghalni, es meghalni annyi, mint kicsit tul messze menni.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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49dccfc
|
They studied Zoorlandian customs and laws. The region was rocky and windy, and the wind was recognized as a positive force since by championing equality in not tolerating towers and tall trees, it only subserved the public aspirations of atmospheric strata that kept diligent watch over the uniformity of the temperature.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c829325
|
Mik az almok? Jelenetek, trivialis vagy tragikus, mozgo vagy statikus, fantasztikus vagy kozonseges jelenetek veletlenszeru sorozatai, melyekben tobbe vagy kevesbe valoszeru esemenyeket habarcsolnak ossze holmi groteszk reszletek es holtak jelennek meg bennuk uj diszletek kozott.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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284d4e2
|
He could swear he did not look back, could not--by any optical chance, or in any prism--have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture--which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never--consisted of a selection and blend of such random ima..
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remembering
memory
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c82f92a
|
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. And perhaps we are. You see, the greater our happiness was, the hazier its edges grew, as if its outlines were melting, and now it has dissolved altogether. I have not stopped loving you; but something is dead in me, and I cannot see you in the mist ... This is all poetry. I am lying to ..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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60cb9e0
|
Az eletnek, a szerelemnek, a konyvtaraknak nincs jovojuk.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b920e27
|
All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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827b2d9
|
But even during this sleep--still, still--his real life showed through too much.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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8b8423f
|
When a hypothesis enters a scientist's mind, he checks it by calculation and experiment, that is, by the mimicry and the pantomime of truth. It's plausibility infects others, and the hypothesis is accepted as the true explanation for the given phenomenon, until someone finds its faults.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4f90a5b
|
When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
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Vladimir Nabokov |