Quote

To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena - all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.

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
Silence
Trace
Enticing
Seen
Occurred
Immerse
Arena
Microscope
White
Reign
Reigns
Cannot
Organs
Microscopes
World
Horizon
Examining
Describe
Wondrous
Crystalline
Relationships
Organ
Circumscribed

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Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
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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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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, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.
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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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A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
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if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
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Memory overshadows the present and dims the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup.
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It is nothing but a kind of a microcosmos of communism - all that psychiatry', rumbled Pnin ... 'Why not leave their private sorrow to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?
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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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Alas! In vain historians pry and probe: The same wind blows, and in the same live robe Truth bends her head to fingers curved cupwise And with a woman's smile and a child's care Examines something she is holding there Concealed by her own shoulder from our eyes.
Vladimir Nabokov