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35d7052
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What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic--one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the light..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ad84170
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I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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2f22f16
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And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an american businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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8f10dd3
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My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God; but was I free?
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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590ec66
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All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f5e3de8
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I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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cbe041d
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There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c0725ac
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The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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bcf1895
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Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
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time
nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c6d76cf
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I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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7cd77d3
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for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4a76255
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All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
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religion
philosophy
philosophy-of-religion
translation
theology
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6da85ec
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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satire
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4c90e67
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To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d585483
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You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f8b0d0a
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of cliches.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6280281
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Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, ..
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suicide
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0f93141
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for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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aae83bd
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My little cup brims with tiddles.
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lolita
vladimir-nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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cc389ee
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my Lolita remarked: "You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted r..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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67b9bec
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There was no Lo to behold.
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lolita
wordplay
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e35a8dc
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Just as the universal family of gifted writers transcends national barriers, so is the gifted reader a universal figure, not subject to spatial or temporal laws. It is he--the good, the excellent reader--who has saved the artists again and again from being destroyed by emperors, dictators, priests, puritans, philistines, political moralists, policemen, postmasters, and prigs. Let me define this admirable reader. He does not belong to any sp..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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2a890a7
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Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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906f088
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Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye."
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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eca7145
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The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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3470c15
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All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanour, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it. Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heav..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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942a811
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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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Vladimir Nabokov |
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5ed74ff
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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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publish
rewrite
rewriting
publishing
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f4f99fa
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I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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7479728
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Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9b16687
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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.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b379d18
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Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple--these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d619650
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We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a31e2f6
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The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me - not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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27533d8
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Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me -to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction- that in the infinitue run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child names Dolores Haze ha..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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dfaed6d
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Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me.
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Vladimir Nabokov Lolita |
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de9e1b3
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I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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13cdaad
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The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.
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man
existence
light
death
darkness
life
cradle
common-sense
calm
afterlife
eternity
life-after-death
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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df5eb97
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My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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3725b35
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Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van's arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual's life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothache, d..
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life
nabakov
real-things
towers
fog
things
perfect
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ab5e493
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do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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01f22a7
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I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.... Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
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memory
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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40e925c
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How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
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recollection
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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96ad59d
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I am sentimental,' she said. 'I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.
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Vladimir Nabokov |