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I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane.

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
Windowpane
Azure
Slain
False
Shadow

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Her lips were like large crimson polyps.
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Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
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I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.
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My little cup brims with tiddles.
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Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.
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It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
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My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
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Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.
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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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There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book great ideas are hogwash.
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Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
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Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.
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In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.
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You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
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