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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
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
Mirrors
Exist
Phantoms
Reflect
Thousands
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane.
Vladimir Nabokov
The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
Vladimir Nabokov
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
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Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
Vladimir Nabokov
His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.
Vladimir Nabokov
Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created it has its fatal flaw.
Vladimir Nabokov
Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.
Vladimir Nabokov
Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
Vladimir Nabokov
Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
Vladimir Nabokov
Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
Vladimir Nabokov
If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
Vladimir Nabokov
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
Vladimir Nabokov
Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? Is that a crime? I countered, and they all laughed.
Vladimir Nabokov
Words without experience are meaningless.
Vladimir Nabokov
My little cup brims with tiddles.
Vladimir Nabokov
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
Vladimir Nabokov
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
Vladimir Nabokov
I don't think in any language. I think in images.
Vladimir Nabokov
