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184282f
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two lumpy old ladies in semitransparent raincoats, like potatoes in cellophane...
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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fd416bc
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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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Vladimir Nabokov |
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01cb03d
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Both were diverted by life's young fumblings, both saddened by the wisdom of time
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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3827709
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He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and s..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c5eaf92
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On Translating Eugene Onegin 1 What is translation? On a platter A poet's pale and glaring head, A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter, And profanation of the dead. The parasites you were so hard on Are pardoned if I have your pardon, O, Pushkin, for my stratagem: I traveled down your secret stem, And reached the root, and fed upon it; Then, in a language newly learned, I grew another stalk and turned Your stanza patterned on a sonnet, I..
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pushkin
translation
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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7aece2e
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I was crazy about goal keeping. In Russia and the Latin countries, that gallant art had been always surrounded with a halo of singular glamour. Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed in the streets by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying ace as an object of thrilled adulation. His sweater, his peaked cap, his kneeguards, the gloves protruding from the hip pocket of his shorts, set him apart from th..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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330e88d
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The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.
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dreams
hope
life
expectancy
idleness
repetition
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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55184b8
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Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet Age: five thousand three hundred days.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e192ab3
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Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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3a8c52a
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There is also a keen pleasure (and after all, what else should the pursuit of science produce?) in meeting the riddle of the initial blossoming of man's mind by postulating a voluptuous pause in the growth of the rest of nature, a lolling and loafing which allowed first of all the formation of -- without which could not have been evolved. "Struggle for life" indeed! The curse of battle and toil leads man back to the boar, to the grunting..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a38177e
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I often felt we lived in a lighted house of glass, and that any moment some thin-lipped parchment face would peer through a carelessly unshaded window to obtain a free glimpse of things that the most jaded voyeur would have paid a small fortune to watch.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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fd5d600
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I am aware of many things being quite as important as good writing and good reading; but in all things it is wiser to go directly to the quiddity, to the text, to the source, to the essence--and only then evolve whatever theories may tempt the philosopher, or the historian, or merely please the spirit of the day. Readers are born free and ought to remain free.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6794c79
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Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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954a1d3
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In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee: "Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight." It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability - a most singular case, I presume - of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest."
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madness
soulful
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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71cf774
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I love you, I'm waiting for you unbearably.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d57526a
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The few times I said to myself anywhere: 'Now that's a nice spot for a permanent home,' I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d7aebe7
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We all admire the spangled acrobat with classic grace meticulously walking his tight rope in the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sagging rope expert wearing scarecrow clothes and impersonating a grotesque drunk! I should know.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4390a7c
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There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, k..
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literature
topical-trash
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b1500ad
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It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle,
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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3137b61
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I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f75d314
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The lovely thing about humanity is that at times one may be unaware of doing right, but one is always aware of doing wrong.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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702fc2a
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When, on a Sunday evening in May 1876, Anna throws herself under the freight train, she has existed more than four years since the beginning of the novel, but in the case of the Lyovins, during the same period, 1872 to 1876, hardly three years have elapsed. It is the best example of relativity in literature that is known to me.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c200d09
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While endowed with the morose temper of genius, he [Lakes, Arts Professor] lacked originality and was aware of that lack; his own paintings always seemed beautifully clever imitations, although one could never quite tell whose manner he mimicked. His profound knowledge of innumerable techniques, his indifference to 'schools' and 'trends', his detestation of quacks, his conviction that there was no difference whatever between a genteel aquar..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0d6253a
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But they are practically brother and sister," ejaculated Marina, thinking as many stupid people do that "practically" works both ways - reducing the truth of a statement and making a truism sound like the truth."
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f0a0da9
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We are duplicitous, we're blind- and it is hard to live, trusting only in life: earthly life is a murky translation from the divine original; the general thought is clear but the primordial music is missing in its words. . . What are passions? Mistakes in the translation. What is love? A rhyme lost in transmission to our discordant language. . . It's time for me to take up the original!
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6c8fb31
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Easy, you know, does it, son.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d0a7645
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and in the end the logical thing would be to give up and I would give up if I were laboring for a reader today, but as there is in the world not a single human who can speak my language; or, more simply, not a single human who can speak; or, even more simply, not a single human; I must think only of myself, of that force which urges me to express myself. I repeat: there is something I know, there is something I know, there is something...
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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67c9d5c
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Then, after all the excitement, I shall experience a certain satiation of suffering--perhaps on the mountain pass to a kind of happiness which it is too early for me to know (I know only that when I reach it, it will be with pen in hand).
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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36dfeb6
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He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard coverin..
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friendly-advice
litcrit
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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bd1978d
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I appeal to parents: never, never say, "Hurry up," to a child. (62)"
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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fcc072d
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It is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the "a" of the first syllable as a misprint and then tries to restore the symmetrical sequence by triplicating the "o"- filling up the row of circles, so to speak, as in a game of crosses and naughts. No-bow-cough. How ugly, how wrong. Every author whose name is fairly often mentioned in periodicals develops a bird-watcher's or caterpillar-picker's knack when ..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b4a5552
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There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies--a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glo..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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53bbe14
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With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a grey neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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67cf074
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photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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81702fe
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The days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation can.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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2ae0635
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I loathe popular pulp, I loathe go-go gangs, I loathe jungle music, I loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories. I especially loathe vulgar movies--cripples raping nuns under tables, or naked-girl breasts squeezing against the tanned torsos of repulsive young males. And, really, I don't think I mock popular trash more often than do other authors who believe with me that a good laugh is the best pesticide.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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fec5f7b
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A wave would arrive, all out of breath, but, as it had nothing to report, it would disperse in apologetic salaams.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c9018fd
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Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day which I first knew with certainty that the red convertible was following us.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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aaa9c9f
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Precautions to be taken in the case Of freak reincarnation: what to do On suddenly discovering that you Are now a young and vulnerable toad Plump in the middle of a busy road, Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine, Or a book mite in a revived divine.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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3305f5c
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No matter how many times we read "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. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds..."
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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7eda614
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I put a gentle hand to my chest as I surveyed the situation. The turquoise blue swimming pool some distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that lawn, but within my thorax, and my organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea water in Nice.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b7638ee
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I esteem my colleagues as I do my own self, I esteem them for two things: because they are able to find perfect felicity in specialized knowledge and because they are not apt to commit physical murder.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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837ba01
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His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss.
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loss
love
regret
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f307522
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Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as None has cried out. Now I shall try what none Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.
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Vladimir Nabokov |