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Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
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
Exasperation
Torture
Attractive
Least
Call
Beautiful
Really
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
Memory overshadows the present and dims the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
Curiously enough, one cannot read a book one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.
Vladimir Nabokov
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
Vladimir Nabokov
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
Vladimir Nabokov
One is always at home in one's past.
Vladimir Nabokov
The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.
Vladimir Nabokov
I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
Vladimir Nabokov
Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.
Vladimir Nabokov
Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac) and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as nymphets.
Vladimir Nabokov
I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.
Vladimir Nabokov
I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
Vladimir Nabokov
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
Vladimir Nabokov
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane.
Vladimir Nabokov
Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.
Vladimir Nabokov
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
