Quotes from Stacy Schiff

Nicholas Nabokov's first wife did all in her power to make the new arrivals comfortable, arranging for them to occupy the flat across the hall in her East Sixty-first Street brownstone until the Tolstoy Foundation located a summer sublet on upper Madison Avenue.

Beaumarchais sighed, consumed by his own labors, "politics only rewards success. Best efforts earn only a bitter smile.

By fretting at unfortunate events we double the evil

Much of the rest of the summer and fall were devoted to the transcription of Invitation to a Beheading, a first draft of which Vladimir had written in a lightning two weeks, on Véra's return from the clinic. To his dismay the typing seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time; in November an exhausted Véra was at the machine night and day. From outside the third-floor apartment, recalled Nabokov, "we heard Hitler's voice from rooftop loudspeakers.

Véra expressed a desire even to hurry it along. "I wish it would go all white," she sighed in 1948, when it was very nearly there. "People will think I married an older woman," her husband protested, to which, without blinking, Véra replied, "Not if they look at you.

Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer.

Offering his own scalding stream of accusations, he terrified the opposition into silence. "By certain documents," Octavian promised to demonstrate that Antony constituted a threat to Rome. He fixed a date on which he would present his evidence. The opposing consuls had seen the daggers; they knew better than to await that session, and secretly fled the city. Nearly four hundred senators followed, sailing to Ephesus

He and Véra were perfectly exhausted, though continually delighted by Dmitri, whom they were deceiving into walking on his own. He would do so only by grasping at trees and bushes as he moved; they fixed a branch in his hand, and off he went.

Eventually the receptionist went to lunch, leaving him alone. An hour after the agreed-upon meeting time he wandered back to where he assumed Gallimard's office to be; the publisher too had left for lunch. Twenty years later—after Gallimard had published Despair but rejected Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, and Speak, Memory—the firm again became Nabokov's publisher. The reception would be dramatically different.

In their wake the bite of incense lingered in the sultry air.

With her death Egypt became a Roman province. It would not recover its autonomy until the twentieth century.

Cases of Conscience

Any people who preferred "a wealthy villain" to "an honest upright man in poverty" deserved, Hancock lectured, to find itself oppressed.

She took the Saturday Review's 1962 test, "Your Literary I.Q.," and outscored VN by a long shot;

Gazing east, Adams elaborated. "Power is intoxicating," he wrote, "and those who are possessed of it too often grow vain and insolent.

A corrupt people would not long remain free. "He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue," he concluded.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. —VOLTAIRE

Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous intersections in history: that of women and power. Clever women, Euripides had warned hundreds of years earlier, were dangerous.

Nefertiti is a face without a queen; Cleopatra is a queen without a face.

Who can adequately express his astonishment at the changes of fortune, and the mysterious vicissitudes in human affairs?

Apollodorus came, Caesar saw, Cleopatra conquered.

Never had he sounded so much like one of his characters, brought down by his passion, unable to escape his own private abyss, heartrendingly separated from his own self-image

Things disturb us in the night. Sometimes they are our consciences. Sometimes they are our secrets. Sometimes they are our fears, translated from one idiom to another. Often what pinches and pricks, gnaws, claws, stabs, and suffocates, like a seventeenth-century witch, is the irritatingly unsolved puzzle in the next room. The

The motto over Chaumont's door read, "Se sta bene non se muove," which a later American tenant translated, overly literally, as "If you stand well, stand still.