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"Who grins in official circumstances?"
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"Discovery is meant to fill in the need of the society."

"That's all YOU know,' said Digory. 'It's because you're a girl. Girls never want to know anything but gossip and rot about people getting engaged."

"I like it because when people use a lot of poker lingo, it usually means they've been playing the game for a while. Which is why I immediately avoid those people."

"A nonhot boy stares at you and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy...well."

"Give me a few minutes."You have time. He sat in the grass."Are you just going to sit there and watch me?"Yes. Watching pretty peasant girls is what we poor little rich boys do best."Peasant?He shrugged. "You started the name calling."

"There are now babies being born in our hospitals with crack or heroin habits, come on, fuck, no one would have dreamt such a horrible thing would happen to a newborn babies in Scotland. I didn't think the sons and daughters, mothers and fathers of Scotland would have been messed up in such a nasty circle of misery, depression, violence, suicides and prisons because of drugs."

"Anyone who is honestly seeking a job and can't find it deserves the attention of the United States government and the people."
Explore more quotes by Vladimir Nabokov


"I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die."


"A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die."


"Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives."


"Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up."


"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."


"But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions."


"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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