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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

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
Character
Chekhov
Pathetic
Emphasis
Author
Characters
Created
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Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers and reason corrects the feverish beat.
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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.
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Solitude was corrupting me.
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Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
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do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
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Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
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At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
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I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
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Her lips were like large crimson polyps.
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
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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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A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.
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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.
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I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
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A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.
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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 only one school of literature - that of talent.
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Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
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My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God but was I free?
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