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Caress the detail, the divine detail.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Vladimir Nabokov
Age: 77 †
Born: 1899
Born: January 1
Died: 1977
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Chess Composer
Chess Player
Journalist
Lepidopterist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
St. Petersburg
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Vladimir Sirin
Vl. Sirin
Wladimir Nabokoff-Sirin
V. Sirin
Spirituality
Details
Chaos
Divine
Religion
Spirit
Caress
Detail
Complexity

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
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We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble there shall Jane's heart always break.
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Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
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The square root of I is I.
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And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.
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If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name.
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I think it is all a matter of love.
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The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
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There was no Lo to behold.
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Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
Vladimir Nabokov
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It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? Is that a crime? I countered, and they all laughed.
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Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
Vladimir Nabokov
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Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
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There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
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I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
Vladimir Nabokov