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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
Summer
Night
Starless
Spasms
Distant
Lightning
Silent
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
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Stirless, I stand at the window, and in the black bowl of the sky glows like a golden drop of honey the mellow moon
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I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
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Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
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I don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.
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Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.
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A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.
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I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
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Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.
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A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
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There was no Lo to behold.
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We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble there shall Jane's heart always break.
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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!
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A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
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No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.
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All great novels are great fairy tales.
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I have no ear for music. When I attend a concert, I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians.
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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
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At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
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