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e426af4
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I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle hell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black str..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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069aca9
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In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys -- literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their a..
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literature
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a91dd2e
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Humbert Humbert: You know, I've missed you terribly. Lolita Haze: I haven't missed you. In fact, I've been revoltingly unfaithful to you. Humbert Humbert: Oh? Lolita Haze: But it doesn't matter a bit, because you've stopped caring anyway. Humbert Humbert: What makes you say I've stopped caring for you? Lolita Haze: Well, you haven't even kissed me yet, have you?
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nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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18e0716
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All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other...
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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380059a
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What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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aa249d0
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You came into my life-not as one comes to visit (you know, "not taking one's hat off") but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps."
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6a93214
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I liked, as I like still, to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by mock marriage of a pun, to turn them inside out, to come upon them unawares. What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do god and devil combine to form a live dog?
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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1da313b
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And the most poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the chorus.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9a9e550
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Solitude was corrupting me.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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dd11bdf
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Perhaps if the year was 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b1169f4
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I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness...I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended [...]
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e352ac4
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The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual;" and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise."
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a98a226
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You see, we find comfort in telling ourselves that the world could not exist without us, that it exists only inasmuch as we ourselves exist, inasmuch as we can represent it to ourselves. Death, infinite space, galaxies, all this is frightening, exactly because it transcends the limits of our perception.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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22391c3
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that is his head, containing a brain of a different brand than that of the synthetic jellies preserved in the skulls around him
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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46fe7ba
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The moral sense in mortals is the duty We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.
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mortality
morality
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vladimir nabokov |
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f6c8e5d
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Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c00a796
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Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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3a48e8f
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Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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5142986
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and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e8d5649
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There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0add466
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Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ea79640
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Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.
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reading
paradise
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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633df55
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It is nothing but a kind of microcosmos of communism--all that psychiatry,' rumbled Pnin, in his answer to Chateau. 'Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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70c7044
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that swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born...
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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83b179e
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Unless a film of flesh envelops 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.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e18ebfc
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offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual"..." --
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lolita
vladimir-nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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376e4ac
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the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense--
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d3d9b51
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Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c597290
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We must distinguish between 'sentimental' and 'sensitive'. A sentimentalist may be a perfect brute in his free time. A sensitive person is never a cruel person. Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them. A sentimental old maid may pamper her parrot and poison her niece. The sentimental politician may remember Mo..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d81f1ae
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The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in r..
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poetry
poet
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9d850b7
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I could not kill , of course, as some have thought. You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
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love
love-at-last-sight
lolita
vladimir-nabokov
love-you-forever
love-at-first-sight
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0f73666
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We sat and drank, each with a separate past locked up in him, and fate's alarm clocks set at unrelated futures -- when, at last, a wrist was cocked, and eyes of consorts met.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4eb0978
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We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open
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passion
love
self-destructive
passionate-love
passionate
fierceness
young-love
obsession
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4f20096
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Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ee2f1d5
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We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
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words
literature
reading
books
meaning
growth
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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076f58c
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Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e41d0fd
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I got out of the car and slammed its door. How matter-of-fact, how square that slam sounded in the void of the sunless day! Woof, commented the dog perfunctorily. I pressed the bell button, it vibrated through my whole system. Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne. From what depth this re-nonsense? Woof, said the dog. A rush and a shuffle, and woosh-woosh went the door. Couple of inches taller. Pink-rimmed glasses. New, heaped-up hairdo, new ear..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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5fe2a83
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I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder - I believe she stole it from her mother's Spanish maid - a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing - and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house her mother's v..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f064302
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Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ee35cc9
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Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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1bc83a0
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Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e5bbb4c
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I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4f22877
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I suppose the pain of parting will be red and loud.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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011d301
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Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann were being accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called "great books." That, for instance, Mann's asinine "Death in Venice," or Pasternak's melodramatic, vilely written "Dr. Zhivago," or Faulkner's corn-cobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces" or at least w..
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Vladimir Nabokov |