Quote

Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.

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
Dark
Studios
Avenue
Stills
Dress
Photo
Power
Remembered
Avenues
Still
Dresses
Remembrance
Like
Memory
Occasion
Infinite
Fifth
Ones
Studio
Rembrandt
Memories
Occasions
Festive

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There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
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Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
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There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.
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The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
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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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The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that offensive is frequently but a synonym for unusual and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.
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Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.
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Of all my Russian books, the defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract Chess is supposed to be
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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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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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Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk.
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Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist.
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Alas! In vain historians pry and probe: The same wind blows, and in the same live robe Truth bends her head to fingers curved cupwise And with a woman's smile and a child's care Examines something she is holding there Concealed by her own shoulder from our eyes.
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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.
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We think not in words but in shadows of words.
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Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
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Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended the destinies of the quick.
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Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
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The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.
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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
Vladimir Nabokov