Quotes About Nabokov

but I say give me rain, rain, rain on the shingle roof for roses and inspiration every time

He began with the day's copy of The New York Times. His lips moving like wrestling worms, he read about all kinds of things. Hrushchov

twirling in his fingers the mummy of a cigar

Wspomnienie nie dawa?o mu spokoju. Mo?na je by?o wytrzyma? przez chwil? i to tylko z perspektywy nieuleczalnej choroby, w wyra?nym przeczuciu nadchodz?cej ?mierci.

This night the password was silence.

also toyed with The Anthemion which is the name of a honeysuckle ornament, consisting of elaborate interlacements and expanding clusters, but nobody liked it;

a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile.

I think there must exist a special subversive group of pseudo-cupids - plump hairless little devils whom Satan commissions to make disgusting mischief in sacrosanct places.

The name yawned like a black doorway, then the door banged.

And all these are worlds," said Hagen. "Or else," said Clements with a yawn, "a frightful mess. I suspect it is really a fluorescent corpse, and we are inside it.

I can only explain my behaviour then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind.

Mr. Wilson affirms that the only characteristic Nabokov trait in my translation (aside from an innate sado-masochistic urge to torture both the reader and himself, as Mr. Wilson puts it in a clumsy attempt to stick a particularly thick and rusty pin into my effigy) is my addiction to rare and unfamiliar words. It does not occur to him that I may have rare and unfamiliar things to convey; that is his loss.

I first understood that things which to me had seemed natural were actually forbidden

Here speaks Professor--' There followed a preposterous little explosion. 'I conduct the classes in Russian. Mrs Fire, who is now working at the library part-time--

I noticed, for instance, that dreams under the midnight sun tended to be highly coloured, and this my friend the photographer confirmed.

A procession of silver pencils marched down an endless tunnel of corruption.

In which portrayed events forever stay. I think she always nursed a small mad hope.

her autobiography was as devoid of interests as her autopsy would have been. I never saw a healthier woman than she, despite thinning diets.

Oh, he was quite a scholar, Mr. Taxovich.

Then Van and Ada met in the passage, and would have kissed at some earlier stage of the Novel's Evolution in the History of Literature.

For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art is the norm.

So I lingered there, pretending, in front of my own self, that I had something to write

Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas

I mesmerized him with it, I saturated him with my vision, I pressed upon him, with a drunkard's wild generosity, all that I was helpless myself to put into verse.