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Vladimir Nabokov

"Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained."

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"Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained."

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Amber Hurdle

"Stop aspiring and start being. The world needs you!"

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Amber Hurdle

"To me, living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past, present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present."

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Amber Hurdle

"Initiative is doing the right thing without being told."

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Amber Hurdle

"Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent."

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Amber Hurdle

"Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but to stand there and take it."

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Amber Hurdle

"Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even."

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Amber Hurdle

"Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth."

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Amber Hurdle

"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."

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Amber Hurdle

"Your unstoppable nature is becoming and blooming - you simply, are. Go easy."

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Amber Hurdle

"I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key."

Explore more quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Vladimir Nabokov
"The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"No free man needs a God; but was I free?How fully I felt nature glued to meAnd how my childish palate loved the tasteHalf-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!My picture book was at an early ageThe painted parchment papering our cage:Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun;Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenonThe iridule - when, beautiful and strange,In a bright sky above a mountain rangeOne opal cloudlet in an oval formReflects the rainbow of a thunderstormWhich in a distant valley has been staged -For we are most artistically caged."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"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."
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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..."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"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."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost."
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