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Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from Terra-these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known . . . this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest 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
Feelings
Romantic
Splendor
Terra
Form
Moon
Sensation
Explorer
Ever
Events
Sensations
Utilitarian
Matter
Results
Panic
Treading
Thing
Feeling
Stomach
Pebbles
Known
Separation
Explorers
Space
Event
Tasting
Interest
Soil
Pits

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We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
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Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly .
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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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In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).
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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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The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
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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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I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
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There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
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Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.
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And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
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Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
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I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
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I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
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