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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e405bed | 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. | recollection thoughts | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| acbf204 | 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.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 99ada0f | That the boy was all that stood between him and death. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 7c18754 | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 2dc314f | 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.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 249a39d | anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 22a4e69 | It occurred to me that I had a fine brain in beautiful working order and that I might as well use it. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 9503030 | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 9ef0f9f | 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 .. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 6f609d0 | 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.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| bf31e90 | 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.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| d9f938f | 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.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| d1da6b3 | the gin kept my heart alive but bemazed my brain | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| f70ccab | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| a260742 | 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.. | love original originality | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 5243116 | 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.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| b70a7b8 | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| b3ae6ae | Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 60c03e4 | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| fff22d5 | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 3dcce9e | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| c3efb2f | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 942f5f3 | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 501cb60 | The following night she came to his bed and she came every night for nine nights running, pushing the door shut and latching it and turning in the slatted light at God knew what hour and stepping out of her clothes and sliding cool and naked against him in the narrow bunk all softness and perfume and the lushness of her black hair falling over him and no caution to her at all. Saying I dont care I dont care. Drawing blood with her teeth whe.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| c20e7e4 | they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed into that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 4ccb78b | Ever is a long time. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| f4cc97e | Whatever voice spoke him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity. a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 007e4d6 | The frailty of everything, revealed at last. | Cormac McCarthy (Author) | ||
| 7cfc594 | He asked her out and she told him she wouldnt go out with a man that drank. He looked her straight in the eye and told her he didnt drink. She like to fell over backwards. I guess it come as somethin of a shock to her to meet a even bigger liear than what she was. But he told the naked truth. Of course she called hishand on it. Said she knew for a fact he drank. Said everbody in Jeff Davis County knew he drank and drank plenty and was wild .. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 64bc7a8 | law is) the pretty branding instrument invented by the overfed to protect themselves against the hungry ? | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 87f199b | A woman's true tenderness, like the true virility of man, is expressed in action of a conquering kind. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| f57fd05 | You revolutionists' the other continued, with leisurely self-confidence, 'are the slaves of the social convention, which is afraid of you; slaves of it as much as the very police that stands up in the defence of that convention. Clearly you are, since you want to revolutionize it. It governs your action, too, and thus neither your thought nor your action can ever be conclusive. (...) 'You are not a bit better than the forces arrayed against.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 73a1d3f | The belief in a super natural sources of evil is not necessary. Men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| fd79843 | The girls were always running out of money, out of cash, precisely, to pay taxi drivers, train conductors, men who delivered pizzas after dark. They borrowed cash, normally, upon arrival. They borrowed passions--Wallace Stevens, Joseph Conrad, Mozart, hiking, the Bible--from each other, as girls of another generation borrowed clothes. | Renata Adler | ||
| afe3e16 | He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| e53937c | And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose. | ocean sea security the-secret-sharer | Joseph Conrad | |
| b709a6e | I remembered the old doctor, - "It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot." I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting." | humanity mankind science | Joseph Conrad | |
| e42f7ae | And after some talk we agreed that the wisdom of rats had been grossly overrated, being in fact no greater than that of men. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 7217ecb | I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead that accumulate in every man's life,--a vague impress on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage. . . | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 46c6172 | This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations. | depression empathy heart heartbreak lost lost-love love mournful mourning music nostalgia regret ruminating sadness suicide thinking tradgedy | Joseph Conrad | |
| 7e2900c | Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place- whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won't pretend to say. | blindness deaf deafness naivety numb | Joseph Conrad | |
| eaa1dfc | Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 5798f29 | In some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 9bdcf52 | The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. | Joseph Conrad |