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Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

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
Grass
Literature
Story
Art
Shimmering
Stories
Prism
Writing
Prisms
Wolf
Tall

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
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Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance.
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I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
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Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?
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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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The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.
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Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
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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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All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
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The square root of I is I.
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Imagine me I shall not exist if you do not imagine me try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.
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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.
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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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You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
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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.
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
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a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
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Solitude was corrupting me.
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if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
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