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Chess Player Inspirational Quotes (2575)

Page 7 of 108
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Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from Terra-these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known . . . this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
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And yet I am happy. Yes, happy. I swear. I swear that I am happy...What does it matter that I am a bit cheap, a bit foul, and that no one appreciates all the remarkable things about me-my fantasy, my erudition, my literary gift...I am happy that I can gaze at myself, for any man is absorbing-yes, really absorbing! ... I am happy-yes, happy!
Vladimir Nabokov
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We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
Vladimir Nabokov
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
Vladimir Nabokov
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But that mimosa grove-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.
Vladimir Nabokov
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All great novels are great fairy tales.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created it has its fatal flaw.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
Vladimir Nabokov
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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!
Vladimir Nabokov
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Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended the destinies of the quick.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I should allow only my heart to have imagination and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.
Vladimir Nabokov
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