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I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.

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
Away
Items
Past
Placed
Character
Noticed
Would
Artificial
Abruptly
World
Novels
Treasured
Characters
Item
Novel
Bestowed
Often
Pine

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I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
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Words without experience are meaningless.
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The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.
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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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I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
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And the rest is rust and stardust.
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I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
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Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
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There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
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I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
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Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
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Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
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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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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
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Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.
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There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called powerful novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.
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