1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3060
3061
3062
3063
3064
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 |
| bf53ba2 | I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a "young girl," and then, into a "college girl"--that horror of horrors." | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 2bba33b | My sweetheart, my love, my love, my love--do you know what--all the happiness of the world, the riches, power and adventures, all the promises of religions, all the enchantment of nature and even human fame are not worth your two letters. It was a night of horror, terrible anguish, when I imagined that your undelivered letter, stuck at some unknown post office, was being destroyed like a sick little stray dog . . . But today it arrived--and.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 46dd196 | My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit, Or, with a silent shiver, order it, Whatever in my field of vision dwelt - An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte Stilettos of a frozen stillicide - Was printed on my eyelids' nether side Where it would tarry for an hour or two, And while this lasted all I had to do Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves, | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| ef32a68 | The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. | poetry writing | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 2ec8844 | Interviewer: What surprises you in life? Nabokov: ...the marvel of consciousness- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being. | Brian Boyd | ||
| e1fbaae | Of students' papers: 'I am generally very benevolent [said Shade]. But there are certain trifles I do not forgive.' Kinbote: 'For instance?' 'Not having read the required book. Having read it like an idiot. Looking in it for symbols; example: "The author uses the striking image green leaves because green is the symbol of happiness and frustration." I am also in the habit of lowering a student's mark catastrophically if he uses "simple" and .. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 2b0c330 | Another part of the ritual was to ascend with closed eyes. 'Step, step, step,' came my mother's voice as she led me up - and sure enough, the surface of the next tread would receive the blind child's confident foot; all one had to do was lift it a little higher than usual, so as to avoid stubbing one's toe against the riser. This slow, somewhat somnambulistic ascension in self-engendered darkness held obvious delights. The keenest of them w.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 6cdc2a7 | I was always lonely and I am lonely still. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 4018d2d | I had once been splintered into a million beings and objects. Today I am one, tomorrow I shall splinter again. And thus everything in the world decants and modulates. That day I was on the crest of a wave. I knew that all my surroundings were notes of one and the same harmony, knew - secretly - the source and the inevitable resolution of the sounds assembled for an instant, and the new chord that would be engendered by each of the dispersin.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 7bf136b | Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce's poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like it? He did. In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors and ardors and Adas | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| b5784eb | I broke her spell by incarnating her in another | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 6d09b1f | I'm walking out now into the soft light, the cooling him of evening, and I will love you tonight, and tomorrow, and still many more, so very many tomorrows. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 689a2bd | God does not exist, as neither does our hereafter, that second bogey being as easily disposed of as the first. Indeed, imagine yourself just dead--and suddenly wide awake in Paradise where, wreathed in smiles, your dear dead welcome you. Now tell me, please, what guarantee do you possess that those beloved ghosts are genuine; that it is really your dear dead mother and not some petty demon mystifying you, masked as your mother and imperson.. | atheism god heaven | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 4dbe73a | The idea of God was invented in the small hours of history by a scam who had genius; it somehow reeks too much of humanity, that idea, to make its azure origin plausible... | atheism god | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| c94b74d | Don't be too sure,' he continued. "The other day I took up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a Swede, too.' 'Hanged himself! Why, in God's name?' I cried. He kept on looking out watchfully. 'Who knows? The sun too much for him, or the country perhaps." -- | Joseph Conrad | ||
| f873af6 | It is this country that is dangerous, with her idealistic conception of legality. The social spirit of this people is wrapped up in scrupulous prejudices and that is fatal to our work.. You talk of England being our only refuge! So much the worse. What do we want with refuges ? Here you talk, print, plot, and do nothing. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 6e6ee40 | There too he had been treated with revolting injustice. His struggles, his privations,his hard work to raise himself in the social scale, had filled him with such an exalted conviction of his merits that it was extremely difficult for the world to treat him with justice-- the standard of that notion depending so much upon the patience of the individual. The Professor had genius, but lacked the great social virtue of resignation. | indignation | Joseph Conrad | |
| 1af3b95 | After a while he became disagreeably affected by the sight of the roadway thronged with vehicles and of the pavement crowded with men and women. He was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an immense multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to the limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| e5745e9 | The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments, that taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended .. | fighting ship-life shipping | Joseph Conrad | |
| f93ffe3 | 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 overshadowed distances. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 70b1358 | Felicity, felicity - how shall I say it? - is quaffed out of a golden cup in every latitude: the flavour is with you - with you alone, and you can make it as intoxicating as you please. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| e35a2c3 | I ask myself whether his rush had really carried him out of that mist in which he loomed interesting if not very big, with floating outlines - a straggler yearning inconsolably for his humble place in the ranks. And besides, the last word is not said, - probably shall never be said. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?...There is never time to say .. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| e9d3aa9 | She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream... | bitter breaking-up breakup breakups dream dreaming heart-break heart-burn heartache indigestion longing love sad | Joseph Conrad | |
| 88ce46c | Nobody, nobody is good enough | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 3a6b7b7 | We live in the flicker - may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 14bf171 | The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation. First the capital evaporates, and then the company goes into liquidation. These are very unnatural physics ... | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 8687b99 | The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink. | red-tape | Joseph Conrad | |
| d92ae3e | Everything is inconceivable. The whole world is inconceivable to the strict logic of ideas. And yet the world exists to our senses, and we exist in it. There must be a necessity superior to our conceptions. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| fba03bc | but I remember I preferred the soldier to the philosopher at the time; a preference which life has only confirmed. One was a man, and the other was either more - or less. However, they are both dead, and Mrs Beard is dead, and youth, strength, genius, thoughts, achievements, simple hearts - all dies... No matter. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| d86926e | Una buona reputazione professionale non e sempre garanzia di un intelletto equilibrato. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 243b014 | Everything belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible--it was not good for one either--trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land--I mean literally. You can't understand. How could you?--with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind n.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 7e7d652 | Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| dc52a94 | The cabman looked at the pieces of silver, which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolised the insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil of a mankind whose day is short on this earth of evil. | life-is-short | Joseph Conrad | |
| 7091576 | about sailors) Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them - the ship; and so is their country - the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a s.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| f2a9b73 | Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? | life | Joseph Conrad | |
| 0bc7bd4 | I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil -- I don't know which. 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 -- and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won't pretend to say. But most of us are neither on.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 030b98e | The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illuminatio.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 39a901e | His last word--to live with,' she murmured. 'Don't you understand I loved him--I loved him--I loved him!' "I pulled myself together and spoke slowly. "'The last word he pronounced was--your name.' "I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it--I was sure!' . . . She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping; she .. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 122ae07 | I must live until I die, mustn't I? | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 5a75012 | There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention- that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his ho.. | depression disaster fear-no-evil fear-of-death mortality murder no-rhyme-or-reason psalm-23 reason-or-rhyme senselessness storms valley-of-the-shadow-of-death | Joseph Conrad | |
| 52da695 | And these days, I find I'm caring less and less about what people think of me. Maybe it's my age, maybe it's my security in my career, maybe it's because I'm skrilla flush with that dollah-dollah-bill-y'all, but if I had to identify my overall feeling these days, it's much more "Eh, screw it. Here's how I really feel." | Mindy Kaling | ||
| ad635ac | Don't be closer to twice a friend's weight than to her actual weight," I told myself. This little mantra has helped me stave off obesity for more than two decades." | Mindy Kaling | ||
| 9746658 | No matter how good you have it, it's cool to want more. | Mindy Kaling | ||
| cd992da | It's sort of my go-to stock image of my childhood, actually. I think it has something to do with knowing I'll never be able to go back to that time that makes me cry every time I listen to it. | Mindy Kaling |