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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.

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
Next
Terror
Chapters
Gloriously
Art
Performances
Produces
Blurred
Three
Somehow
Obscure
Quotation
Made
Lack
Ending
Pseudo
Image
Mirror
Quotations
Meaning
Performance
Supplies
Produce
Mirrors
Chapter
Acrobatic
Crazy
Despite
Literal
Diminutive

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I confess, I do not believe in time.
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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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It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
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My own ultraviolet darling. Lolita
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Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
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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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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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in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.
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A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
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Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).
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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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I think it is all a matter of love.
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Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac) and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as nymphets.
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Don't touch me I'll die if you touch me.
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
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Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
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All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
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How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
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