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"Lighted advertisements went running up dark red facades and dissipating again. He would pass girls; he would turn to look; but the prettier the face, the harder it was to take the plunge."
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"Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity."

"I have wished a bird would fly away,And not sing by my house all day;Have clapped my hands at him from the doorWhen it seemed as if I could bear no more.The fault must partly have been in me.The bird was not to blame for his keys.And of course there must be something wrongIn waiting to silence any song."

"She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar."

"How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books - gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's?"If he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one?"Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled. "TouchA©. He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story..."

"He is talking to people in Toronto, trying to find out if I am guilty; but he won't find it out that way. He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that other have done for you."
Explore more quotes by Vladimir Nabokov


"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..."


"Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities."


"When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor."


"Do all people have that? A face, a phrase, a landscape, an air bubble from the past suddenly floating up as if released by the head warden's child from a cell in the brain while the mind is at work on some totally different matter? Something of the sort also occurs just before falling asleep when what you think you are thinking is not at all what you think. Or two parallel passenger trains of thought, one overtaking the other."


"As Ganin looked up at the skeletal roof in the ethereal sky he realized with merciless clarity that his affair with Mary was ended forever. It had lasted no more than four days-four days which were perhaps the happiest days of his life. But now he had exhausted his memories, was sated by them, and the image of Mary, together with that of the old dying poet, now remained in the house of ghosts, which itself was already a memory."
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