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9503030
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An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9ef0f9f
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Sometimes... Come on, how often exactly, Bert? Can you recall four, five, more such occasions? Or would no human heart have survived two or three? Sometimes (I have nothing to say in reply to your question), while Lolita would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine pride ..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6f609d0
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The answer to all questions of life and death, "the absolute solution" was written all over the world he had known: it was like a traveller realising that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant slope; th..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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bf31e90
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One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue afternoon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out I rested a while on a boulder and then thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parap..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d9f938f
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Might it console you to know that I expect nothing but torture from her return? That I regard you as a bird of paradise? She shook her head. - That my admiration for you is painfully strong? - I want Van - she cried - and not intangible admiration. - Intangible? You goose. You my gauge it, you may brush it once very lightly with the knuckles of you gloved hand. I said knuckles. I said once. That will do. I can't kiss you. Not even your burn..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d1da6b3
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the gin kept my heart alive but bemazed my brain
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f70ccab
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One last word are you quite quite ure 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.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a260742
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You couldn't get more original than Laura. Laura. Yes, she was an original, all right. One of a kind. Did they break her mold or what, pal? Or...or did it ? Still, Laura. The one and the only. Such a plain name for a unique cutie. But perhaps my acuity is not without its problems. I ruin everything: a stupid story to be tapped out on my tomb's stone. I ruined even Laura. And an original ruin is rare. Just ask the archaeologist, "Egypt, aga..
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love
original
originality
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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5243116
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To hold her, to keep her -- just as she was -- with her cruelty, with her vulgarity, with her blinding blue eyes, with her miserable poetry, with her fat feet, with her impure, dry, sordid, infantile soul. All of a sudden he thought: If people are reunited in Heaven (I don't believe it, but suppose), then how shall I stop it from creeping upon me, that shriveled, helpless, lame thing, her soul? But this is the earth, and I am, curiously eno..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b70a7b8
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even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b3ae6ae
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Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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60c03e4
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I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory and a slippery hold.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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fff22d5
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A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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3dcce9e
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It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c3efb2f
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Now I shall speak of evil as none has Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz; The white-hosed moron torturing a black Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac; Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools; Music in supermarkets; swimming pools; Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds, and sharks.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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942f5f3
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Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse--I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do--pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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62a3d84
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We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ab54b43
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And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy
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lovers
love
nymph
lolita
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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53ab617
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A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young. I remember how once, between terms, not at Cornell, a student brought a transistor set with him into the reading room. He managed to state that one, he was playing "classical" music; that two, he was doing it "softly"; and that three, "there were not many readers around in summer." I was th..
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cornell
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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409c42e
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She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible -- and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary -- fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy p..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a827859
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Feeling a bit nervous, as most people do at the prospect of seeing a doctor, I thought I would buy on my way to him something soothing to prevent an accelerated pulse from misleading credulous science.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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daaddf8
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My solemn exasperation was to her the silence of love.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d9a5438
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At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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41b0e92
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Philosophy is the invention of the rich.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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60c0c1b
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Nothing is more occult than the way letters, under the auspices of unimaginable carriers, circulate through the weird mess of civil wars; but whenever, owing to that mess, there was some break in our correspondence, Tamara would act as if she ranked deliveries with ordinary natural phenomena such as the weather or tides, which human affairs could not affect, and she would accuse me of not answering her, when in fact I did nothing but write ..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0f60470
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You have to be an artist and a madman...
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life
philosophy
truth-of-life
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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42a614f
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None could discern in him the shyness that makes a person so conspicuous among people who know each other well and are bound together by the established echoes of private jokes and by an allusive residue of people's names that to them are alive with special significance, making the newcomer feel as if the magazine story he has started to read had really begun long ago ... and he wonders if they have not deliberately contrived a conversation..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b862424
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A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e000eae
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The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part jewel, part mud. In the midst of my usual afternoon stroll through the small hilly town attached to the girls' college where I taught French literature, I had stopped to watch a family of brilliant icicles drip-dripping from the eaves of a frame house. So clear-cut were their pointed shadows on the white boards behind them that I was sure the shadows of the falling drop..
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winter
snow
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a13efd2
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He stood up and took off the dressing gown, the skullcap, the slippers. He took off the linen trousers and shirt. He took off his head like a toupee, took off his collarbones like shoulder straps, took off his rib cage like a hauberk. He took off his hips and his legs, he took off his arms like gauntlets and threw them in a corner. What was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly coloring the air.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d955bc1
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Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up.
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lolita
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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40e7b9b
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What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself...never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because...the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind...but because, if one we..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4854038
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Curiously enough, 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 stan..
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reading
art
reader
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0664430
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The mind writes with a pen, the heart, with a pencil.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a5a8c90
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When you laugh, I want to transform the entire world so it will mirror you.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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33066b3
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A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plungin..
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vladimir
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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25b9e3e
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They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kissed on the trim turf of old-world mountainsides, on the innerspring moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks, and in so many cabanes in so so many beech forests...
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lolita
nabokov
wilderness
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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965224c
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No Leslie, I'm not dead. I have finished building a world, and this is my Sabbath rest.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ed16541
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What are these hopes, and who is this savior?" "Imagination," replied Cincinnatus."
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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1a8a243
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Nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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7a45955
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It may look as though I do not know how to start. Funny sight, the elderly gentleman who comes lumbering by, jowl flesh flopping, in a valiant dash for the last bus, which he eventually overtakes but is afraid to board in motion and so, with a sheepish smile, drops back, still going at a trot. Is it that I dare not make the leap? It roars, gathers speed, will presently vanish irrevocably around the corner, the bus, the motorbus, the mighty ..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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3a079e8
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After all, there is no harm in smiling.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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42bf54f
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realidade" (uma das poucas palavras que so fazem sentido entre aspas)"
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4117ee5
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Dostoevski's The Double is his best work though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's "Nose."
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gogol
the-double
nikolai-gogol
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Vladimir Nabokov |