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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.

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
Perhaps
Concretely
Brain
Discerned
Future
Individually
Past
Seductive
Better
Existed
Something
Balanced
Would
Demands
Demand

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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
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The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
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Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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My own ultraviolet darling. Lolita
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena - all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.
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If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name.
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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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All the information I have about myself is from forged documents.
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Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile.
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There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
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Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.
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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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A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
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