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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c5eaf92 | 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.. | pushkin translation | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 7aece2e | 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.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 330e88d | 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. | dreams expectancy hope idleness life repetition | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 55184b8 | Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet Age: five thousand three hundred days. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| e192ab3 | Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 3a8c52a | 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.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| a38177e | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| fd5d600 | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 6794c79 | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 954a1d3 | 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." | madness soulful | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 71cf774 | I love you, I'm waiting for you unbearably. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| d57526a | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| d7aebe7 | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 4390a7c | 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.. | literature topical-trash | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| b1500ad | It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle, | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 3137b61 | I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| f75d314 | The lovely thing about humanity is that at times one may be unaware of doing right, but one is always aware of doing wrong. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 702fc2a | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| c200d09 | 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.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 0d6253a | 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." | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| f0a0da9 | 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! | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 6c8fb31 | Easy, you know, does it, son. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| d0a7645 | 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... | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 975cd68 | Avoid irritation more than exposure to the sun...In the tropics one must before everything keep calm.' . . . | Joseph Conrad | ||
| d2ec05f | He was ruined in every way, but a man possessed of passion is not a bankrupt in life. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 8daf644 | The terrosirt and the policeman both come form the same basket. Revolution, legality - countermoves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 3e9bff0 | Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 7c9aa75 | To break up the superstition and worship of legality should be our aim. Nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half our battle would be won then; the desintegration of the old morality would have set in in its very temple. That is what you ought to aim at. But you revolutionists will never understand that. You plan the future, you lose.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 18f477e | Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overschadowed distances. [...] And this stillness of life did not in the .. | nature | Joseph Conrad | |
| 8aaf2aa | Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there.. | hypocrisy life thinking | Joseph Conrad | |
| 7bfbaaf | To the destruction of what is. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 39c858f | We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, of an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toilo. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet.. | humanity | Joseph Conrad | |
| fb934e3 | A duel, whether regarded as a ceremony in the cult of honour, or even when reduced in its moral essence to a form of manly sport, demands a perfect singleness of intention, a homicidal austerity of mood. [The duel] | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 42d84a6 | No man engaged in a work he does not like can preserve many saving illusions about himself. The distaste, the absence of glamour, extend from the occupation to the personality. It is only when our appointed activities seem by a lucky accident to obey the particular earnestness of our temperament that we can taste the comfort of complete self-deception. | idolatry job | Joseph Conrad | |
| 7035b42 | The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| c7e158c | The fascination of the abomination. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 93c8777 | The man who can't do most things and won't do the rest | Joseph Conrad | ||
| f80fd53 | Perverse] unreason has its own logical processes | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 50548b9 | If anybody had ever struggled with a soul, I am the man | Joseph Conrad | ||
| d63f455 | I am stupid, am I not? What more can I want? If you ask them who is brave--who is true--who is just--who is it they would trust with their lives?--they would say, Tuan Jim. And yet they can never know the real, real truth.... | anxiety-disorders burden cowardly emotional-wounds guilty-conscience haunted haunting hypocrisy monster-under-the-bed monsters-of-men ptsd secret self-hate sinful-nature why-we-need-jesus wounded-souls wounds-to-the-heart | Joseph Conrad | |
| 9c410ad | in our own hearts we trust for our salvation, in the men that surround us, in the sights that fill our eyes, in the sounds that fill our ears, and in the air that fill our lungs. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| ed56e0a | It was one of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit, crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 41546ff | No one ever wants to hear how stressed out anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out. | Mindy Kaling | ||
| e1ea7c2 | I don't think it should be socially acceptable for people to say they are "bad with names." No one is bad with names. That is not a real thing. Not knowing people's names isn't a neurological condition; it's a choice. You choose not to make learning people's names a priority. It's like saying, "Hey, a disclaimer about me: I'm rude." For heaven's sake, if you don't know someone's name, just pretend you do. Do that thing everyone else does, w.. | Mindy Kaling |