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Here lies the sense of literary creation to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .

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
Future
Tenderness
Times
Literary
Mirrors
Fragrant
Sense
Lies
Discern
Around
Ordinary
Portray
Find
Objects
Kindly
Creation
Reflected
Lying
Posterity

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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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Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
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Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.
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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
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I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
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I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
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Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
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You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
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Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book great ideas are hogwash.
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In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
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A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.
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Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
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