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294a3f3
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We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his ..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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cdb5332
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There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itse..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6ff63d7
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The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
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nostalgia
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b079ffa
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On such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen mud and horror in my heart.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0d0fe9d
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Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry--English, Russian and French--than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingu..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4345a68
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I felt instinctively that toilets - as also telephones - happened to be for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch. We all have such fateful objects - it may be a recurrent landscape, a number in another - carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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8bdfb6d
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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
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simple-minds
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d81d1b0
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I felt my life needed a shake-up.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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191c3bc
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Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.
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philosophy
thought
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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90860fd
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I knew--but I did know that I had crossed 700 The border. Everything I loved was lost But no aorta could report regret. A sun of rubber was convulsed and set; And blood-black nothingness began to spin A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played. I
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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dcd6926
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Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the centre vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief - the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was r..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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546d1d8
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No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f2b2dfb
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a little downy girl still wearing poppies still eating popcorn in the colored gloam where tawny Indians took paid croppers because you stole her from her wax-browed and dignified protector spitting into his heavy-lidded eye ripping his flavid toga and at dawn leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort the awfulness of love and violets remorse despair while you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away because of all you did be..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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07ba34a
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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passion
love
obsessive-love
lolita
obsession
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e79e303
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By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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1c252ed
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The sky was so heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes -- telling them to pass it on and on in a..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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57c040d
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I really knew nothing about her, blinded as I was by that burning loveliness which replaces everything else and justifies everything
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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56364b5
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I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.
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therapy
psychology
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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982c197
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I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.
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magic
moths
butterflies
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0561dff
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There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children grante..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c6b80f4
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This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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44893fe
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It is certainly not then--not in dreams--but when one is wide awake, in moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9cd2ce6
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In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a62ec4d
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He was one of those persons whom one loves not because of some lustrous streak of talent (this retired businessman possessed none), but because every moment spent with them fits exactly the gauge of one's life. There are friendships like circuses, waterfalls, libraries; there are others comparable to old dressing gowns. You found nothing especially attractive about Maximov's mind if you took it apart: his ideas were conservative, his tastes..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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eaf475f
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I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a480bab
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Drug addicts, especially young ones, are conformists flocking together in sticky groups, and I do not write for groups, nor approve of group therapy (the big scene in the Freudian farce); as I have said often enough, I write for myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts. Young dunces who turn to drugs cannot read "Lolita," or any of my books, some in fact cannot read at all. Let me also observe..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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61c6ac1
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This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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29d4a3d
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I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world- nymphet love. (135)
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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da2e18d
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But then what should I have done with you, Nina, how should I have disposed of the store of sadness that had gradually accumulated as a result of our seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings?
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a781880
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She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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1ef4b95
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No you can't take a pistol and plug a girl you don't even know simply because she attracts you.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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21784d1
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There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, [...]; 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 in natural colors.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9a237f9
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It happens that over a long period you are promised a great success, in which from the very start you do not believe, so dissimilar is it from the rest of fate's offering, and if from time to time you do think of it, then you do so as it were to indulge your fantasy - but when, at last, on a very ordinary day with a west wind blowing, the news comes - simply, instantaneously and decisevely destroying any hope in it - then you are suddenly a..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b646a6f
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For life has worn me down: continual uneasiness, concealment of my knowledge, pretense, fear, a painful straining of all my nerves--not to let down, not to ring out ... and even to this day I still feel an ache in that part of my memory where the very beginning of this effort is recorded, that is, the occasion when I first understood that things which to me had seemed natural were actually forbidden, impossible, that any thought of them was..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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bc4d326
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If I am not master of my life, not sultan of my own being, then no man's logic and no man's ecstatic fits may force me to find less silly my impossibly silly position: that of God's slave; no, not his slave even, but just a match which is aimlessly struck and then blown out by some inquisitive child, the terror of his toys.
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god
evangelism
atheism
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ae3a6d5
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My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on "ideas." Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the "how" above the "what" but do not let it be confused with the "so what." Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point...
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0094513
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I am here through an error--not in this prison, specifically--but in this whole terrible, striped world;
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0d181bd
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Actually he was a pessimist, and, like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e405bed
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Do all people have that? A face, a phrase, a landscape, an air bubble from the past suddenly floating up as if released by the head warden's child from a cell in the brain while the mind is at work on some totally different matter? Something of the sort also occurs just before falling asleep when what you think you are thinking is not at all what you think. Or two parallel passenger trains of thought, one overtaking the other.
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thoughts
recollection
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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acbf204
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He suggested I play golf, but finally agreed to give me something that, he said, "would really work"; and going to a cabinet, he produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one end, which, he said, had just been placed on the market and were intended not for neurotics whom a draft of water could calm if properly administered, but only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for cent..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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7c18754
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Her disintegration went down a shaft of phases, every one more racking than the last; for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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2dc314f
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This, and much more, she accepted - for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case - mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tendernes..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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249a39d
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anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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22a4e69
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It occurred to me that I had a fine brain in beautiful working order and that I might as well use it.
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Vladimir Nabokov |