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I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.

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
Lewis
Call
Firsts
First
Always
Carroll

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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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My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
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He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
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Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
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Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
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The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.
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I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
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My own ultraviolet darling. Lolita
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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
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My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
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Look at this tangle of thorns.
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Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.
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Words without experience are meaningless.
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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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There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me.
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Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
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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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I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.
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