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The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
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
Night
Starless
Spasms
Distant
Lightning
Silent
Summer
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.
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I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
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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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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
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I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.
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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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I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.
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Don't touch me I'll die if you touch me.
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The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.
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I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.
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Caress the detail, the divine detail.
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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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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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Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
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Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
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I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.
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To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
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It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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