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I think she always nursed a small mad hope.

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
Nurse
Mad
Small
Hope
Always
Think
Thinking
Nursed

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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
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Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.
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Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
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I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.
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Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.
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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.
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And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.
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At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
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My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God but was I free?
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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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All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
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