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Authors & Writing
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Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly recalling his sacrifice of both Rooks to the unfortunate and noble Kieseritsky
-Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense foreword
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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Baby, Babies
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The tiny madman in his padded cell.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Children
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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.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Death
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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.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Education
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Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Fame
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It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Imagination
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Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Life
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Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Memory
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I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
-Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions
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Moon
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Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known... this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Murder
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Proverbial Wisdom
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There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Reading
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
-Vladimir Nabokov, LECTURES ON LITERATURE, 1980
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Snow
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
-Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift
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Solitude
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Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
-Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, 1962
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Books by and about Vladimir Nabokov