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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.

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
Happy
Hate
Ends
Feel
Feels
People
Cheated
Norm
Harm

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We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
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We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
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Ada girl, adored girl, [...] I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.
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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
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I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.
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It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
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Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
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The lost glove is happy.
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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
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No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.
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The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that offensive is frequently but a synonym for unusual and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.
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Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.
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Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
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There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
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And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.
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