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The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
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
Literal
Useful
Thousand
Times
Paraphrase
Prettiest
Translation
Translations
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
Vladimir Nabokov
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
Vladimir Nabokov
Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.
Vladimir Nabokov
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
Vladimir Nabokov
Life with you was lovely—and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink ‘v’ in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering ‘l.’ Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too.
Vladimir Nabokov
My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.
Vladimir Nabokov
Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.
Vladimir Nabokov
We think not in words but in shadows of words.
Vladimir Nabokov
Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.
Vladimir Nabokov
Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
Vladimir Nabokov
Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
Vladimir Nabokov
My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God but was I free?
Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
Vladimir Nabokov
Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
Vladimir Nabokov
if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
Vladimir Nabokov
And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: O rainbow-colored gods. . .
Vladimir Nabokov
A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
Vladimir Nabokov
In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.
Vladimir Nabokov
