top of page
.png){kind=small}
"A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things-how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver-and this inability enhanced my oppression."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Beauty quotes
"Then, were not summer's distillation leftA liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet."
"What is your substance, whereof are you made,That millions of strange shadows on you tend?Since everyone hath every one, one shade,And you, but one, can every shadow lend.Describe Adonis, and the counterfeitIs poorly imitated after you.On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set,And you in Grecian tires are painted new.Speak of the spring and foison of the year;The one doth shadow of your beauty show,The other as your bounty doth appear,And you in every blessA d shape we know.In all external grace you have some part,But you like none, none you, for constant heart."
"If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty you only look when you love the person taking the picture."
"World will be a beautiful place only with beautiful minds!"
Explore more quotes by 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."
"That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out."
"The idea of God was invented in the small hours of history by a scam who had genius; it somehow reeks too much of humanity, that idea, to make its azure origin plausible..."
"Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?"
"His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence."
"I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."
bottom of page