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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
Hope
Always
Think
Thinking
Nursed
Nurse
Mad
Small

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Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.
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When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
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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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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.
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Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
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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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Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
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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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