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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

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
Sea
Cannot
Whole
Breaking
Explain
Wave

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Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.
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I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.
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Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.
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If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
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Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
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One is always at home in one's past.
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a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.
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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.
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There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.
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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.
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A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
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Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
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