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Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

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Famous Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

“When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.”

TryingEndsActionPastCausesImaginationMy OwnComplexesSurrenderAlternativesMotiveFacultyRoutesCravingBoundlessMy PastForksAnalyticsRetrospective
Book:Lolita
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“It is certainly not then-not in dreams- but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”

MomentsFeelingsDreamTruthPastJoyChanceConsciousnessLimitsAchievementHighestWideAwakeMortalityTowersPeersCastlesMistRight DirectionRobustMastsWide AwakeTerrace
Book:Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited
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“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, space as time, time as space - and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die.”

YearsHumansStillsDifferentProblemPastUsedDiesTurnsFoundSpaceLevelsPathFashionMirrorsFinalsTriumphTragicMatureIdleVagueVersusTime And SpaceVansTwistedMotorCartsMazesArchesDifferent LevelsMulesTacklingNarrow PathBreaking Away
Author:Vladimir Nabokov
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“Perhaps if the year was 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer.”

IfsWayWantYearsMightPastUsedClassMiddleScientistErasGentlePoisonMiddle ClassKillersHollowPalaces
Book:The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated
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“No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.”

ShouldWritingI CanCountryEnoughPastYoungMastersJudgmentLowsFairsExpectedAdmireMagazinesSensualBotherProvokingAccuracyEmulateMammalsSensuousFree CountryChuckles
Book:Lolita
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“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.”

IfsKnowsWritingStillsPastMotherThreeMemoriesSunStyleSummerDiedBottomAccidentsGoldenObservationHillsPocketsWarmthFreakLightningInfancyDuskSuspendedPicnicsRemnantsMother DiedFurryDellPhotogenicMidges
Book:Lolita
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