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Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?

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
People
Disdainful
Shave
Aids
Hearing
Guess
Littles
Little
Much

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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
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The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.
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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
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Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly .
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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
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The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
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And the rest is rust and stardust.
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.
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By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
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Freudism and all it has tainted with its grotesque implications and methods, appear to me to be one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others. I reject it utterly, along with a few other medieval items still adored by the ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick.
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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 am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
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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.
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I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.
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I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
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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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And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: O rainbow-colored gods. . .
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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.
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