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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3be29fd | But it is the mark of a leader, to hold all possibilities, even the unpleasant--even the unthinkable. | Christie Golden | ||
| 2709a98 | My actions should depend on what I know, not what I suspect. | Christie Golden | ||
| ef0a720 | One can not always believe what one hears. | Christie Golden | ||
| f8b8502 | You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but remains forever, icy and silent. | loss memory | Harold Pinter | |
| d8de0e6 | He pictured both cities simultaneously, as though they hung on the extended arms of the orange clouds. Suspended. Tiny San Francisco dangling to the north: innocent, rich and a little bit silly. The sprawling, demented snake of L.A. to the south. Its fanged mouth wide open, eyes blazing, paralyzed in a lunge of pure paranoia. This was the place to be, he thought. Right here. In the middle. Smack in the belly of California where he could eye.. | Sam Shepard | ||
| 0ad3375 | Your voice, through the beelike hum, was remote and anxious. It kept sliding into the distance and vanishing. I spoke to you with tightly shut eyes, and felt like crying. My love for you was the throbbing, welling warmth of tears. That is exactly how I imagined paradise: silence and tears, and the warm silk of your knees. This you could not comprehend. | love paradise vladimir-nabokov | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 75e3507 | Old Azureus's manner of welcoming people was a silent rhapsody. Ecstatically beaming, slowly, tenderly, he would take your hand between his soft palms, hold it thus as if it were a long sought treasure or a sparrow all fluff and heart, in moist silence, peering at you the while with his beaming wrinkles rather than with his eyes, and then, very slowly, the silvery smile would start to dissolve, the tender old hands would gradually release t.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 6d1ef88 | I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously; reveling in the new life-harmony which I was creating. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 9efe7a0 | We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds. | philosophy stockings | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 6bcec4d | Where the devil did you get her?" "I beg your pardon?" "I said: the weather is getting better." "Seems so." "Who's the lassie?" "My daughter." "You lie - she's not." | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| b0fc969 | He had liked her enormously, and he loved Krug with the same passion that a big sleek long-flewed hound feels for the high-booted hunter who reeks of the marsh as he leans towards the red fire. Krug could take aim at a flock of the most popular and sublime human thoughts and bring down a wild goose any time. But he could not kill death. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| e9f5475 | I had always thought that wringing one's hands was a fictional gesture -- the obscure outcome, perhaps, of some medieval ritual; but as I took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate meditation, this was the gesture ("look, Lord, at these chains!") that would have come nearest to the mute expression of my mood." | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| ee0b2e1 | It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| e569268 | Two silent time zones had now merged to form the standard time of one man's fate; and it is not impossible that the poet in New Wye and the thug in New York awoke that morning at the same crushed beat of their Timekeeper's stopwatch. | destiny fate time | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 5c739fe | Go on from here, Ada, please. (She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics an.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| d7e5b02 | Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer's black nights, what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became as transparent as boxes of glass! | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 16a4ba7 | The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy. | lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| e811e78 | Nos queriamos con amor prematuro, con la violencia que a menudo destruye vidas adultas | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| d689014 | Era Lo, sencillamente Lo, por la manana, un metro cuarenta y ocho de estatura con pies descalzos. Era Lola con pantalones. Era Dolly en la escuela. Era Dolores cuando firmaba. Pero en mis brazos era siempre Lolita. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 9b5ac02 | That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out. | common-sense | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| fcf2b6b | My angel, oh my angel, perhaps our whole earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like "dental" and "transcendental" (remember?), and the true meaning of reality, of that piercing term, purged of all our strange, dreamy, masquerade interpretations, now sounds so pure and sweet that you, angel, find it amusing that we could have taken the dream so seriously (although you and I did have an inkling of why ever.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 48e3205 | It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to do me a refined aesthetic favor, had touched my sleeve and said, "I want you to meet-" and led me to Nina, who sat in the corner of a couch, her body folded Z-wise, with an ashtray at her heel, and she took a long turquoise cigarette holder from her lips and joyfully, slowly exclaimed, "Well, of all people-" and then all evening my heart felt.. | in spring | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 41be592 | During the two months of our stay at Biarritz, my passion for Colette all but surpassed my passion for Cleopatra. Since my parents were not keen to meet hers, I saw her only on the beach; but I thought of her constantly. If I noticed she had been crying, I felt a surge of helpless anguish that brought tears to my own eyes. I could not destroy the mosquitoes that had left their bites on her frail neck, but I could, and did, have a successful.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 201a02e | She was an extravagantly slender girl. Her ribs showed. The conspicuous knobs of her hipbones framed a hollowed abdomen, so flat as to belie the notion of "belly." Her exquisite bone structure immediately slipped into a novel - became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems." | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| a36d0ce | Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| bf6dad4 | There was a sudden sunburst in my head. And then black night. That blackness was sublime. I felt distributed through space and time: One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand 150 Under the pebbles of a panting strand, One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain, In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain. There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene, An icy shiver down my Age of Stone, And all tomorrows in my funn.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| a32c472 | Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as "great literature" by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the preten.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 5ff2afb | And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then perm.. | child consciousness love | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| a5338ad | In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel--and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 19c697b | A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things--how to get rid of them, how to transform them in.. | observation writing | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| fcd677f | It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| daeaf6a | Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom. | doomed foreshadowing lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 5f6f8c3 | In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 0f6ac0d | Beaming and melting in smiles of benevolence and self-effacement, they sidled up and plumped down next to Lucette, who turned to them with her last, last, last free gift of staunch courtesy that was stronger than failure and death. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| f0fdbb9 | Geniusz to brak przystosowania. | separateness | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 0ffbd31 | We are still groping perhaps, but we grope intelligently, like a gynecologist feeling a tumor. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| b5d3384 | My heart seemed everywhere at once. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| d6ceefb | Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| dc94ae9 | The Girl Scout's motto is also mine. I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such as -- well, never mind what. My duty is --to be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I am cheerful. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word, and deed. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 28376bc | Because of a streak of dreaminess and a gentle abstraction in his nature, Victor in any queue was always at its very end. He had long since grown used to this handicap, as one grows used to weak sight or a limp. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 24fc542 | There is nothing louder than an American hotel; and, mind you, this was supposed to be a quiet, cozy, old-fashioned, homey place - 'gracious living' and all that stuff. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 5d48f41 | To be quite candid -- and what I am going to say now is something I have never said before, and I hope that it provokes a salutary chill -- I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 14d78b2 | Because you took advantage of a sinner Because you took advantage Because you took because you took advantage of my disadvantage | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 64d9ddd | 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. --VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Speak, Memory: A Memoir | Sheldon Solomon |