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Exlpore more Poetry quotes

"You need a poetic touch from the outer space? Then you need the moonlight!"

"I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty."

"Good poetry does not exist merely for the sake of itself, but rather, is a byproduct of yearning and growth; great poetry canonizes that yearning for the growth of others."

"The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is."

"A poem can't do its work if you only read snippets of it."

"The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly."

"Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry."

"From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be."
Explore more quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible."

"I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading."

"A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past."

"Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths-until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about."

"And yet I shall try again: "they are murdering me!"--all right, all together once more: "they are murdering me!" and again: "murdering"... I want to write this in such a way that you will cover your ears, your membranaceous, simian ears that you hide under strands of beautiful feminine hair--but I know them, I see them, I pinch them, the cold little things, I worry them with my fingers to somehow warm them, bring them to life, render them human, force them to hear me."

"One last word,' I said in my horrible careful English, 'are you quite, quite sure that-well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but-well-some day, any day, you will not come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope''No,' she said smiling, 'no.''It would have made all the difference,' said Humbert Humbert.Then I pulled out my automatic-I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it."

"The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale, and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates."
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