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"A man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one's watch, since together with the man, the whole world is destroyed; the last letter is instantly reduced to dust and, with it, all the postmen; and like smoke, vanishes the estate bequeathed to a nonexistent progeny."
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Exlpore more Mortality quotes
"Tombstones covered the dale, the smooth marble surfaces bright. She had spent days here as a teenager, though not out of any awareness of mortality. Like every adolescent, she intended to live forever."
"And then his noise falls completely silent-And he stops struggling-And looking right into my eyes-He dies.My Todd dies."
"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;This sensible warm motion to becomeA kneaded clod; and the delighted spiritTo bathe in fiery floods, or to resideIn thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,And blown with restless violence round aboutThe pendent world; or to be worse than worstOf those that lawless and incertain thoughtImagine howling: 'tis too horrible!The weariest and most loathed worldly lifeThat age, ache, penury and imprisonmentCan lay on nature is a paradiseTo what we fear of death."
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."
"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."
"The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes."
"The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book."
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