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Vladimir Nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov quotes Showing 1-30 of 1,676
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
― Lolita
― Lolita
“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”
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“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes”
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“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.
"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
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"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
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“Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.”
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“Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.”
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“I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.”
― Lolita
― Lolita
“All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.”
― Lolita
― Lolita
“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible”
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“We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.”
― Lolita
― Lolita
“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”
― Lolita
― Lolita
“I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.”
― Lolita
― Lolita
“Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.”
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“Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”
― Pnin
― Pnin
“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.”
― Lectures on Literature
― Lectures on Literature
“Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.”
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“The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.”
― The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
― The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
“Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.”
― Mary
― Mary
“Let all of life be an unfettered howl.”
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“And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.”
― Lolita
― Lolita
“I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.”
― Lolita
― Lolita
“Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.”
― Lolita
― Lolita