if a violin string could ache, i would be that string. Vladimir Nabokov More Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov More Quotes From Vladimir Nabokov No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has. Vladimir Nabokov emphasis chekhov character Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed. Vladimir Nabokov long-ago movie writing Solitude was corrupting me. Vladimir Nabokov solitude All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. Vladimir Nabokov style matter stories A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader. Vladimir Nabokov fit fiction world To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute. Vladimir Nabokov safety play art I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. Vladimir Nabokov melancholy misery art 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 limits nine age I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine. Vladimir Nabokov balanced mad mind But that mimosa grove-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another. Vladimir Nabokov flames girl stars It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail. Vladimir Nabokov loathing details war It is nothing but a kind of a microcosmos of communism - all that psychiatry', rumbled Pnin ... 'Why not leave their private sorrow to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess? Vladimir Nabokov why-not sorrow people Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry. Vladimir Nabokov mimicry anxiety way All religions are based on obsolete terminology. Vladimir Nabokov terminology obsolete …She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul. Vladimir Nabokov soul bridges book I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past. Vladimir Nabokov drunk impossible past 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 novelists letters fiction Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Vladimir Nabokov seductive brain past Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains. Vladimir Nabokov brain writing book That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born. Vladimir Nabokov swimming dark men
