Quote

Ada girl, adored girl, [...] I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.

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
Cannot
Void
Cans
Nothing
Illness
Adored
Heart
Laughter
Dreadful
Going
Hearts
Radiant
Long
Mines
Corn
Ada
Love
Mine
Scar
Unseemly
Life
Broken
Recently
Mended
Girl
Cried
Brood

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... my mind lay limp in an empty world.
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
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By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
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The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.
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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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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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There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
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…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.
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Look at this tangle of thorns.
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Dear Jesus, do something.
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And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.
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I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane.
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A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.
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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 am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
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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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