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Chess Composer Inspirational Quotes (722)

Page 5 of 31
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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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The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.
Vladimir Nabokov
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As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Here lies the sense of literary creation to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .
Vladimir Nabokov
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It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.
Vladimir Nabokov
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in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.
Vladimir Nabokov
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That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A good laugh is the best pesticide.
Vladimir Nabokov
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