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for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

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
Lasts
Last
Better
Commentator
Commentators
Worse
Word

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
Vladimir Nabokov
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We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.
Vladimir Nabokov
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You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
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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I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created it has its fatal flaw.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais!
Vladimir Nabokov
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I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
Vladimir Nabokov
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We are most artistically caged.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Ada girl, adored girl, [...] I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.
Vladimir Nabokov