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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e0bc072 | There can be no emblem or parable in a village idiot's hallucinations or in last night's dream of any of us in this hall. In those random visions nothing - underline nothing (grating sound of horizontal stroke can be construed as allowing itself to be deciphered y a witch doctor that can then cure a madman or give confort to a killer by laying the blame on a too fond, too fiendish or too indifferent parent - secret festerings that the foste.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| a6699a6 | I notice a whiff of Swift in some of my notes. I too am a desponder in my nature, an uneasy, peevish, and suspicious man, although I have my moments of volatility and fou rire. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| ed032c3 | The bowl that emerged was one of those gifts whose first impact produces in the recipient's mind a colored image, a blazoned blur, reflecting with such emblematic force the sweet nature of the donor that the tangible attributes of the thing are dissolved, as it were, in this pure inner blaze, but suddenly and forever leap into brilliant being when praised by an outsider to whom the true glory of the object is unknown. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| ff3ef70 | Unfortunately his urge to write had suddenly petered out and he did not know what to do with himself. He was not sleepy having slept after dinner. The brandy only added to the nuisance. He was a big heavy man of the hairy sort with a somewhat Beethovenlike face. He had lost his wife in November. He had taught philosophy. He was exceedingly virile. His name was Adam Krug. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 9242036 | Lolita, luce della mia vita, fuoco dei miei lombi. Mio peccato, anima mia. Lo-li-ta: la punta della lingua compie un percorso di tre passi sul palato per battere, al terzo, contro i denti. Lo. Li. Ta. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 6afefed | and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. | ironic true | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 81035a1 | I adore you. I shall never love any- body in my life as I adore you, never and nowhere, neither in eternity, nor in terrenity, neither in Ladore, nor on Terra, where they say our souls go. But! But, my love, my Van, I'm physical, horribly physical | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 5e17a98 | she surrenders her bulk to the wicker armchair, which, out of sheer fright, bursts into a salvo of crackling. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 01beac5 | But how can I begin writing when I do not know whether I shall have time enough, and the torture comes when you say to yourself, 'Yesterday there would have been enough time'--and again you think, 'If only I had begun yesterday ...' And instead of the clear and precise work that is needed, instead of a gradual preparation of the soul for that morning when it will have to get up, when--when you, soul, will be offered the executioner's pail t.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 03e11f6 | He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| c9ff65d | To her he would surrender the remnants of himself at the first trumpet blast of destiny. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| df21731 | Vai nguoi - va toi la mot trong so ho - ghet nhung cai ket vui. Chung toi thay bi lua. Ton thuong la binh thuong. Nghiep chuong bat kha cuong. Tran tuyet lo dung giua duong chi vai buoc tren ngoi lang co rum da hanh xu khong chi phi luan ma con vo dao. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| ee23835 | I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| d0d1bff | But one shelf was a little neater than the rest and here I noted the following sequence which for a moment seemed to form a vague musical phrase, oddly familiar: Hamlet, La morte d'Arthur, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, South Wind, The Lady with the Dog, Madame Bovary, The Invisible Man, Le Temps Retrouve, Anglo-Persian Dictionary, The Author of Trixie, Alice in Wonderland, Ulysses, About Buying a Horse, King Lear ... | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| d030865 | Knight seemed to him to be constantly playing some game of his own invention, without telling his partners its rules. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 4dce508 | Vsegda udivliaius' tomu, skol'ko sliuny u prostogo naroda. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 769e448 | No free man needs a God; but was I free? How fully I felt nature glued to me And how my childish palate loved the taste Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste! My picture book was at an early age The painted parchment papering our cage: Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun; Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon The iridule - when, beautiful and strange, In a bright sky above a mountain range One opal cloudlet in an oval form .. | nature | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 530783b | how can I write about this when I am afraid of not having time to finish and of stirring up all these thoughts in vain? | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 114fb90 | It's exactly my sense of existing - a fragment, a wisp of color. | nabokov | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 5be803d | But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets it rolling, doomed never again to stop? | memory soul | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| c466cd7 | From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment. | sentiment | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 00e8c76 | I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for the look of lust always is gloomy; lust is never quite sure--even when the velvety victim is locked up in one's dungeon--that some rival devil or influential god may still not abolish one's prepared triumph. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 0c5422f | If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece. Line | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 6e550a0 | The weather this morning was so-so: dullish, but warm, a boiled-milk sky, with skin- but if you pushed it aside with a teaspoon, the sun was really nice, so I wore my white trousers. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 3befce9 | No free man needs a God; but was I free? | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 8d0e37c | All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train. | humor irony | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| a1b1b7e | The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: "First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull." Kinbote: "You appreciate particularly the purple passages?" Shade: "Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane." | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 4aa400f | For you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 93c3e4a | Preparation for the future was necessary, and he was willing to admit that the great change would perhaps come in the upheaval of a revolution. But he argued that revolutionary propaganda was a delicate work of high conscience. It was the education of the masters of the world. It should be as careful as the education given to kings. | education revolution | Joseph Conrad | |
| bece9b6 | Ell per mi era nomes un nom. El veieu? Veieu la historia? Veieu alguna cosa? Em sembla com si us intentes explicar un somni, i es en va, perque cap narracio d'un somni no ens pot transmetre la sensacio de somni, aquella barreja d'absurditat, de sorpresa i d'atordiment en un estremiment de lluita i rebel*lio, aquella sensacio de ser abassegat per aquell punt increible, que es la veritable essencia dels somnis. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| f822beb | It would have been so much in accordance with the wisdom of life, which consists in putting out of sight all the reminders of our folly, of our weakness, of our mortality; all that makes against our efficiency -- the memory of our failures, the hints of our undying fears, the bodies of our dead friends. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 6ab1b96 | 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. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| aa25454 | But there is an unholy fascination in systematic noise. He did not flee from it incontinently, as one might have expected him to do. He remained, astonished at himself for remaining, since nothing could have been more repulsive to his tastes, more painful to his senses, and, so to speak, more contrary to his genius, than this rude exhibition of vigour. The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, .. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| a42db22 | As Joseph Conrad said, we need to be taught when young to hope, to love, to put our trust in life. | George E. Vaillant | ||
| 0af67ee | The panes streamed with rain, and the short street he looked down into lay wet and empty, as if swept clear suddenly by a great flood. It was a very trying day, choked in raw fog to begin with, and now drowned in cold rain. The flickering, blurred flames of gas-lamps seemed to be dissolving in a watery atmosphere. And the lofty pretensions of a mankind oppressed by the miserable indignities of the weather appeared as a colossal and hopeless.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 806202b | Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake, and vanish into a great silence in which your ship moves on with a sort of magical effect. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 28bae7f | It is a great doctor for sore hearts and sore heads, too, your ship's routine, which I have seen soothe--at least for a time--the most turbulent of spirits. There is health in it, and peace, and satisfaction of the accomplished round; for each day of the ship's life seems to close a circle within the wide ring of the sea horizon. It borrows a certain dignity of sameness from the majestic monotony of the sea. He who loves the sea loves also .. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 109c399 | By all that's wonderful, it is the sea, I believe, the sea itself -- or is it youth alone? Who can tell? But you here -- you all had something out of life: money, love -- whatever one gets on shore -- and, tell me, wasn't that the best time, that time when we were young at sea; young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing, except hard knocks -- and sometimes a chance to feel your strength -- that only -- what you all regret?" And we.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 727d7be | Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 6ab9c95 | And yet I have known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An elemental force is ruthlessly frank | Joseph Conrad | ||
| fe06872 | They (Romans) were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force - nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind - as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth which mostl.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 7108c06 | The way of even the most justifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. The Professor's indignation found in itself a final cause that absolued him from the sin of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To destroy public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of an established social order cannot be effectually s.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 98b4059 | True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present position. It would have alarmed his superiors, and done away with his chances of promotion. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 5c3c993 | Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or grit.. | Joseph Conrad |