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"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."
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"The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able to compile such works as they did if they had not been careful in collecting and arranging their matter under different heads."
"The only lesson you can learn from history is that it repeats itself."
"Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great."
"Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It's a crime."Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.Tengo went on, "Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves."
"It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and not celebrated until 'Juneteenth'. There may be those in Texas now who believe they can insulate their state-a state that had its own courageous revolution-from the news of evolution and from the writing in 1786 of a Constitution that refuses to mention religion except when demarcating and limiting its role in the public square. But we promise them today that they will join their fore-runners in the flat-earth community, and in the mad clerical clique of those who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Yes, they will be in schoolbooks-as a joke on the epic scale of William Jennings Bryan. We shall be fair, and take care to ensure that their tale is told."
"Many if not most slaves would have each readily jumped, and many if not most slaves would each readily jump, at the opportunity to be a master, if such an opportunity presents or had presented itself."
"Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist; Mr. Draper had just taken the first photograph of the moon, freezing her pale face on cold paper; Mr. Morse had recently announced a way of transmitting messages down metal wires. Had you mentioned magic or Faerie to any of them, they would have smiled at you disdainfully, except, perhaps for Mr. Dickens, at the time a young man, and beardless. He would have looked at you wistfully."
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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