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A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.

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
Cost
Drizzle
Insurrection
Toothache
Cancel
Trifles
Importance
Battle

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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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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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Literature was not born the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.
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I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
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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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I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
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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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Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.
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Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
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I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.
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My little cup brims with tiddles.
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The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
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At a very early stage of the novel's development I get this urge to collect bits of straw and fluff, and to eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it.
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.
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I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
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...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.
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Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities.
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I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
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Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.
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