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"Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity."
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"Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal."

"They built these little tanning booths for Brooke and I to do nothing but lay down and tan all over."

"It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing."

"Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened."

"Mostly, nothing's really changed. I'm still the dorky nerd that I always was."

"What concerns me, is the general social tendency to enforce a level, above which nothing rises and stands out."

"Nothing is more idealistic than a journalist on the defensive."

"You can't live in the past, there's nothing you can do about it."

"No More Avengers! There's nothing new to get out of it - I want to go forward, not backward."
Explore more quotes by Vladimir Nabokov


"Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle."


"IphWas a larvorium and a violet:A grave in Reason's early spring. And yetIt missed the gist of the whole thing; it missedWhat mostly interests the preterist;For we die every day; oblivion thrivesNot on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,And our best yesterdays are now foul pilesOf crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.I'm ready to become a floweretOr a fat fly, but never, to forget."


"The idea of God was invented in the small hours of history by a scam who had genius; it somehow reeks too much of humanity, that idea, to make its azure origin plausible..."


"Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain - the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed - then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood."


"And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all."


"I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth."


"That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out."
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