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a335c7b
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I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash.
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politics
ideology
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d0a517a
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For the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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67981d3
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My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it w..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9844cdc
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Because you took advantage of a sinner because you took advantage because you took because you took advantage of my disadvantage ... "That's good, you know. That's damned good." ... when I stood Adam-naked before a federal law and all its stinging stars "Oh, grand stuff!" ... Because you took advantage of a sin when I was helpless moulting moist and tender hoping for the best dreaming of marriage in a mountain state aye of a litter of Lolit..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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65c2847
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Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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35ca3af
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For some reason, I kept seeing it--it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina--a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, "pinging" pebbles at an empty can."
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vladimir-nabokov
sad
memory
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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cb64080
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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 we met we had had the same dreams.
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loss
love
young-love
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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80550ae
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Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov's round of weird visits in Gogol's "Dead Souls."
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f4e4597
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I qualify it as pathetic. Pathetic--because despite the insatiable fire of my venereal appetite, I intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old child.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9d4262d
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One last word,' I said in my horrible careful English, 'are you quite, quite sure that--well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but--well--some day, any day, you will not come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope' 'No,' she said smiling, 'no.' 'It would have made all the difference,' said Humbert Humbert. Then I pulled out my automatic-I mean, t..
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lolita
vladimir-nabokov
proposal
sad
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a4f9cff
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And speaking of this wonderful machine: [840] I'm puzzled by the difference between Two methods of composing: , the kind Which goes on solely in the poet's mind, A testing of performing words, while he Is soaping a third time one leg, and , The other kind, much more decorous, when He's in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought, The abstract battle is concretely fought. The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops..
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literature
writing
pencil
paper
pen
teaching
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e93330b
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Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities.
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criticism
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9f24e77
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As it happens with many people who do not trouble about religion in the ordinary trend of life, I hastily invented a soft, warm, tear-misty God, and whispered an informal prayer. Let me get there in time, let him hold out till I come, let him tell me his secret. Now it was all snow: the glass had grown a grey beard.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f830a2d
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And now, said Ada, Van is going to stop being vulgar--I mean, stop forever! Because I had and have and shall always have only one beau, only one beast, only one sorrow, only one joy.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4db1130
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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. Had I been reading about this mild old man, instead of writing about him, I would have preferred him to discover, upon his arrival to Cremona, that his lecture was not this Friday but the next. Actually, however, ..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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894bbd1
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I was an infant when my parents died. Thye both were ornithologists. I've tried So often to evoke them that today I have a thousand parents. Sadly they Dissolve in their own virtues and recede, But certain words, chance words I hear or read, Such as "bad heart" always to him refer, And "cancer of the pancreas" to her."
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parents
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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5bf78e7
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In my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom, postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ef8b5eb
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Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father's maternal grandfather had been, say, a Turk.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b84efd8
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I am an actor, living generally on air, but I have always elastic hopes for the future; they may be stretched indefinitely, such hopes, without bursting
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hope
actor
actors
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e2e51c4
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She had been crying after a routine row with her mother and, as had happened on former occasions, had not wished me to see her swollen eyes: she had one of those tender complexions that after a good cry get all blurred and inflamed, and morbidly alluring. I regretted keenly her mistake about my private aesthetics, for I simply love that tinge of Botticellian pink [3], that raw rose about the lips, those wet, matted eyelashes; and, naturally..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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1b08a9e
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Antes de conocernos ya habiamos tenido los mismos suenos. Comparamos anotaciones. Encontramos extranas afinidades.
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amor
destino
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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2ef8ca1
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They come and go, without the drowsy observer's participation, but are essentially different from dream pictures for he is still master of his senses. They are often grotesque. I am pestered by roguish profiles, by some coarse-featured and florid dwarf with a swelling nostril or ear. At times, however, my photisms take on a rather soothing flou quality, and then I see--projected, as it were, upon the inside of the eyelid--gray figures walki..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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1f83f2c
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Il buon lettore] non appartiene a una nazione o a una classe specifica. Non c'e direttore di coscienza o club del libro che possa gestire la sua anima. Il suo modo d'accostarsi a un'opera di narrativa non e determinato da quelle emozioni giovanili che portano il lettore mediocre a identificarsi con questo o quel personaggio e a "saltare le descrizioni". Il buon lettore, il lettore ammirevole, non s'identifica con il ragazzo o la ragazza del..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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eb3928d
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Look at the harlequins! [...] All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together--jokes, images--and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4bd1aea
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By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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3b97561
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Reader! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was! Since his supersensitive system was loath to face the actual scene, he thought he could at least enjoy a secret part of it--which reminds one of the tenth or twentieth soldier in the raping queue who throws the girl's black shawl over her white face so as not to see those impossible eyes while taking his military pleasure in the sad, sacked village.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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34a40f3
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She groped for words. I supplied them mentally (' broke my heart. merely broke my life').
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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79c98fe
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She had imagination -- the muscle of the soul -- and her imagination was of a particularly strong, almost masculine quality. She possessed, too, that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying-pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier. And finally she was blest with a keen sense of humour. No wonder she fitted into his life so well.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b0710bf
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Somber Yellowstone Park and its colored hot springs, baby geysers, rainbows of bubbling mud - symbols of my passion.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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42e86b3
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According to my almond-eyed little spy, the great surgeon, may his own liver rot, lied to me when he declared yesterday with a deathhead's grin that the had been . Well, it had been so in the sense Euler called zero the perfect number. Actually, they ripped me open, cast one horrified look at my decayed , and without touching it sewed me up again.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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282e2a1
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I love you, my sun, my life, I love your eyes-closed- all the little tails of your thoughts, your stretchy vowels, your whole soul from head to heels.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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37a8f74
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This stood for the Evolution of Sense, his greatest course (with an enrollment of twelve, none even remotely apostolic) which had opened and would close with the phrase destined to be overquoted one day: The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4ded630
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If only it were possible to juicily belch up the life one's lived, chew it anew and gulp it down, and then once more to roll it with a fat, ox-like tongue, to squeeze from its eternal dregs the former sweetness of crisp grass, drunk with the morning dew and the bitterness of lilac leaves!
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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cd3e8ed
|
And Schyogolev launched on a discussion of politics. Like many unpaid windbags he thought that he could combine the reports he read in the papers by paid windbags into an orderly scheme, upon following which a logical and sober mind (in this case his mind) could with no effort explain and foresee a multitude of world events. The names of countries and of their leading representatives became in his hands something in the nature of labels for..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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07a6251
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Forget me now, but remember me afterwards, when the bitter part is forgotten. This
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6c21868
|
There was a rhythm, an alternation in the dripping that I found as teasing as a coin trick.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0beccf3
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No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conductive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is no..
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immoral
horrible
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9920ed3
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Bueno, algun dia, si quieres venirte a vivir conmigo... Creare un nuevo Dios y le agradecere con gritos desgarradores si me das una esperanza microscopica.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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8bb8515
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Logical reasoning may be a most convenient means of mental communication for covering short distances, but the curvature of the earth, alas, is reflected even in logic: an ideally rational progression of thought will finally bring you back to the point of departure where you return aware of the simplicity of genius, with a delightful sensation that you have embraced truth, while actually you have merely embraced your own self... anything yo..
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truth
logic
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f9aa364
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For we die every day; oblivion thrives Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives, And our best yesterdays are now foul piles Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.
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time
life
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b6da3df
|
Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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24df9ea
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T]his is how it will remain until ... literary criticism discards its sociological, religious, philosophical and other textbooks, which only help mediocrity to admire itself. Only then will you be free to say what you please. [F]or God's sake stop that irrelevant chitchat.
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mediocrity
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f1146c2
|
the awfulness of love and violets
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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31ba7d5
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With a heavy heart I left the house and walked through the spotted blaze of the sun to my car. Two other cars were parked on both sides of it, and I had some trouble squeezing out.
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Vladimir Nabokov |