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"There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity."
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"He got why Eleanor tried so hard to look different. Sort of. It was because she was different - because she wasn't afraid to be."
"When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbours, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs, intended to do different things."
"Life is too short as we all know it to be. So why dare to spend it trying to live up to other people's worldly expectations of you?"
"I saw myself as an outsider as a teen. I was home-schooled and got my G.E.D. when I was 16 I wasn't interested in high school at all and figured that college might be more entertaining."
"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people."
"She said my glasses made me look like a butch jock's locker room bitch."
"The world doesn't celebrate your similarity but your difference."
"Stuck in my own trap of writing about a nonsubject, I think I can defend my own self-respect, and also the integrity of a lost girl, by saying two things. First, the trivial doings of Paris Hilton are of no importance to me, or anyone else, and I should not be forced to contemplate them. Second, she should be left alone to lead such a life as has been left to her. If this seems paradoxical, then very well."
"Dare to be different."
"Nothing is more ridiculous than one person telling another how to live."
Explore more quotes by 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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..."
"A destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate's way - even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications."
"You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance."
"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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