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I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

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
Humble
Proud
Knowing
Something
Sufficiently
Modest
Ego

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I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.
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Look at this tangle of thorns.
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Memory overshadows the present and dims the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup.
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Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
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In reading, one should notice and fondle details.
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I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.
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We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble there shall Jane's heart always break.
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There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me.
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Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.
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Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
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Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
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I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.
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When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - hoping that I like the book as much as he does - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.
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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 contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
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