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"Don't touch me, I'll die if you touch me."
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"In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love."
"It seems my heart is made of tissue paper, I wish the world would handle it more delicately."
"I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block."
"I'm not sure. But there's something about the darkness, the stillness of this hour, I think, that creates a language of its own. There's a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability we allow ourselves at exactly the wrong moment, tricked by the darkness into thinking it will keep our secrets. We forget that the blackness is not a blanket; we forget that the sun will soon rise. But in the moment, at least, we feel brave enough to say things we'd never say in the light."
"I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories."
"Turns out rolling your eyes in a bar when 'Land Down Under' plays is like someone belching during the Star Spangled Banner in America."
"Despite the way she rallied, the haunted look in her eyes was enough to break him, as lost and lonely as an abandoned child's."
"I feel like I should love them right away. But how do you do that? You can't make yourself love someone, can you?"
"What was worse, he couldn't tell her how much he thought he maybe might kinda sorta love her."
"I enabled your tendency to be vulnerable and weak, and your habits of crying when 6,000 others were present for the music."
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."
"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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