Quote

It is nothing but a kind of a microcosmos of communism - all that psychiatry', rumbled Pnin ... 'Why not leave their private sorrow to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?

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
Nothing
Rumbled
Thing
Psychiatry
Kind
Communism
Really
Possess
World
Private
People
Sorrow
Leave
Asks

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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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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All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
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There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
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Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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I don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.
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A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world.
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Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.
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Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
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As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.
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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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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.
Vladimir Nabokov
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That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.
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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.
Vladimir Nabokov
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a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
Vladimir Nabokov