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Vladimir Nabokov

"As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs."

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"As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs."

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Amber Hurdle

"Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds."

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Amber Hurdle

"Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her."

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Amber Hurdle

"Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead."

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Amber Hurdle

"He lives vividly in her recollections, however, and his memory is etched on her soul."

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Amber Hurdle

"Scent is the strongest tie to memory."

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Amber Hurdle

"Some of my anger has faded, but it isn't hard to call back. All I have to do is think about how cold the air was and how loud the laughter was. Look at her. She's a child."

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Amber Hurdle

"People never forget two things, their first love and the money they wasted watching a bad movie."

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Amber Hurdle

"It's not that I can't remember. It's that I prefer not to remember, which means that I prefer not to remember what not remembering did to me the last time I did it."

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Amber Hurdle

"The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before."

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Amber Hurdle

"Tell me about your family," I said. And so she did. I listened intently as my mother went through each branch of the tree. Years later, after the funeral, Maria had asked me questions about the family - who was related to whom - and I struggled. I couldn't remember. A big chunk of our history had been buried with my mother. You should never let your past disappear that way."

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Vladimir Nabokov
"All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train."
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"Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"The few times I said to myself anywhere: 'Now that's a nice spot for a permanent home,' I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"If I am not master of my life, not sultan of my own being, then no man's logic and no man's ecstatic fits may force me to find less silly my impossibly silly position: that of God's slave; no, not his slave even, but just a match which is aimlessly struck and then blown out by some inquisitive child, the terror of his toys."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds."
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Vladimir Nabokov
"I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet."
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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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