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Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.
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
People
Harm
Jam
Track
Cheated
Feet
Tracks
Happy
Doom
Cowering
Hate
Norm
Unnaturally
Ends
Stopping
Avalanche
Feel
Village
Avalanches
Feels
Behave
Behaves
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
Vladimir Nabokov
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
Vladimir Nabokov
I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
Vladimir Nabokov
At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
Vladimir Nabokov
All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
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Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.
Vladimir Nabokov
It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
Vladimir Nabokov
My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God but was I free?
Vladimir Nabokov
Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
Vladimir Nabokov
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
Vladimir Nabokov
A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
Vladimir Nabokov
I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
Vladimir Nabokov
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
Vladimir Nabokov
It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.
Vladimir Nabokov
Caress the detail, the divine detail.
Vladimir Nabokov
Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
Vladimir Nabokov
