1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3059
3060
3061
3062
3063
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0c59875 | But I did not yet know, at that time, how tender the earth can be for those who have only her and how many graves in her giving, for the living." First Love" | Samuel Beckett | ||
| 79ec361 | Yes it sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger. Then I see the sky different from what it is and the earth too takes on false colours. It looks like rest, it is not, I vanish happy in that alien light, which must have once been mine, I am willing to believe it, then the anguish of return, I won't say where, I can't, to absence perhaps, you must return, that's all I k.. | Samuel Beckett | ||
| 04c6685 | Oh my god" Meg ranted. "Her water just broke!" Margaret" Eve said, "get a grip - and a towel. I'll be there in five minutes." (After her sister is off to the hospital and Meg comes close to hyperventalating) Shouldn't we have called an ambulance or something?" Meg fretted. Oh for heavens sakes," Eve replied. "You don't need an ambulance!" Not for me, Mother for Sierra." | Linda Lael Miller | ||
| a27173a | A risky plan, but what is life without risk, eh? | Christie Golden | ||
| 110e996 | I am who I am. Whether in joy or in pain. I am who I am. | Christie Golden | ||
| d803323 | Ventress gave him a look that was so completely her, it tore him apart. "You don't...tell me what to do, Idiot." A small smile surprised him. "Never could," he admitted. "Damn right." Another bout of coughing racked her thin frame, and for a devastating, heart-scalding second Vos thought this would take her. But she continued. "I'm proud of you for...what you did over there. You chose loving me instead of hating him." Her bloody-frothed lip.. | Christie Golden | ||
| 933f3c8 | It is arrogance to believe you can know all things. Perhaps you are right. But perhaps you are not. | Christie Golden | ||
| 5ef3321 | I am not going to waste time on revenge when my energy is better spent toward rebuilding. | Christie Golden | ||
| b4e5cbc | Humans are pathetically greedy and easy to manipulate. | Christie Golden | ||
| 50423d0 | Glory, battle, great momentsss, are where we give to the world. But we cannot give without receiving. We cannot share what we do not have inside. It is this quiet, the pause between breathsss, that makes us what we truly are. Gives us ssstrength for all our journeys. | Christie Golden | ||
| 5ad55e7 | Sometimes lessons take time to learn. | Christie Golden | ||
| ee838a6 | Your virtue is safe with me. Your discomfort is rather charming, actually, but I'm sure you'll get over it. | Christie Golden | ||
| 67c623a | Austin: "Well it is like salvation sort of. I mean the smell. I love the smell of toast. And the sun's coming up. It makes me feel like anything's possible. Y'know?" | Sam Shepard | ||
| 67c9d5c | 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). | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 36dfeb6 | 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.. | friendly-advice litcrit | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| bd1978d | I appeal to parents: never, never say, "Hurry up," to a child. (62)" | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| fcc072d | 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 .. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| b4a5552 | 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.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 53bbe14 | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 67cf074 | photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 81702fe | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| c271021 | All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other. | Vladimir Nabokovir Nabokov | ||
| 2ae0635 | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| fec5f7b | A wave would arrive, all out of breath, but, as it had nothing to report, it would disperse in apologetic salaams. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| c9018fd | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| aaa9c9f | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 3305f5c | 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..." | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 7eda614 | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| b7638ee | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 837ba01 | His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss. | loss love regret | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| f307522 | 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. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 809e2c3 | In the fatal course of the most painful ailments, sometimes [...], sometimes there occur sweet mornings of perfect repose- and that not owning to some blessed pill or potion [...] or at least without our knowing that the loving hand of despair slipped us the drug. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| f0207b8 | There are few physiques I loathe more than the heavy low-slung pelvis, thick calves and deplorable complexion of the average coed (in whom I see, maybe, the coffin of coarse female flesh within which my nymphets are buried alive). | female-body humbert-humbert-humbert | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 319e76f | Death," he had said on another occasion, "seems to be merely a bad habit, which nature is at present powerless to overcome." | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| b640fef | The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries. | reader writer writing | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 81e9611 | She looked around, loosened her bra, and turned over on her stomach to give her back a chance to be feasted upon. She said she loved me. She sighed deeply. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 867db2c | The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| fff4425 | On Du Bois] Celebrated Negro scholar and organizer. 70 years old, but looks 50. Dusky face, grizzled goatee, nice wrinkles, big ears -- prodigiously like a White Russian General in mufti played sympathetically by Emil Jannings. Piebald hands. Brilliant talker, with an old-world touch. Tres gentilhomme. Smokes special Turkish cigarettes. Charming and distinguished in other, more important, ways. Told me that when he went to England he was li.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| bf77968 | But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years - problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space,.. | i-am-because space time | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| e5e332a | Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words; a man who had only to breathe on any particle of his stupendous vocabulary to have that particle live and expand and throw out tremulous tentacles until it became a complex image with a pulsing brain and correlated limbs. Three centuries later, another man, in another country, was trying to render these rhythms and metaphors in a different tongue. This process.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 72b93cc | I am quite willing to admit that they are also a deception but right now I believe in them so much that I infect them with truth. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| b349fc7 | Why our poet chose to give his 1958 hurricane a little-used Spanish name sometimes given to parrots) instead of Linda or Lois, is not clear. | self-referential | Nabokov Vladimir | |
| a3c11c6 | Any future is unknown - but sometimes it acquires a particular fogginess, as if some other force had come to the aid of destiny's natural reticence and distributed this resilient fog, from which thought rebounds. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 0c3433b | There, tam, la-bas, the gaze of men glows with inimitable understanding; there the freaks that are tortured here walk unmolested; there time takes shape according to one's pleasure, like a figured rug whose folds can be gathered in such a way that two designs will meet--and the rug is once again smoothed out, and you live on, or else superimpose the next image on the last, endlessly, endlessly, with the leisurely concentration of a woman se.. | Vladimir Nabokov |