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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.

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
Secret
Durable
Art
Sonnet
May
Prophetic
Thinking
Refuge
Immortality
Pigments
Angels
Lolita
Angel
Sonnets
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Pigment

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.
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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
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I don't think in any language. I think in images.
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.
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She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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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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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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I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
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I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth.
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The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
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I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.
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As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me.
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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.
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There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
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The square root of I is I.
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It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
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Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.
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I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.
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