Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin; 22 April 1899c – 2 July 1977) was a Russian-American novelist. His first nine novels were in Russian, and he achieved international prominence after he began writing English prose...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth23 April 1899
CitySaint Petersburg, Russia
CountryUnited States of America
touch-me ifs dies
Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.
children men sight
I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.
trying may assuming
I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.
summer mother memories
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
life-is obscure poet
If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
tears hot lovers
...(hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)...
circles vicious spirals
The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.
forever fallen
I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
two glasses bird
There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
beautiful attractive torture
Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
color sky flames
I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
book creative enough
Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.
kissing loving-you feelings
I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear face, we must part, we must part.
advantage disadvantages
Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.