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" The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Darkness
Common Sense
Us
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" My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Music
Simple
Oppression
" Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Great
Style
Structure
" I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Away
Past
Pine
" Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Before
Complacency
Being
" Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Enjoy
Enjoy Life
Imagination
" 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. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Being There
Words
Invisible
" The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Chances
Mind
More
" Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Harm
People
Happy
" It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Only
Hard
More
" I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Mind
Right
Anybody
" Caress the detail, the divine detail. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Detail
Divine
Caress
" Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Great
Death
Life Is A
" I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Child
Like
Speak
" Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Painting
Long
Rather
" No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Less
Pathetic
Created
" A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past. "
Vladimir Nabokov
More
Like
Home
" To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Play
Power
Triumph
" A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Imagination
Writer
Poet
" A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Fiction
Original
Masterpiece
" You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Count
Always
Style
" I confess, I do not believe in time. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Believe
Time
Confess
" It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Hoot
Walk
Hallelujah
" Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Once
Past
Associated
" There is only one school of literature - that of talent. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Literature
Talent
Only
" Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. "
Vladimir Nabokov
More
Vulgarity
Than
" Satire is a lesson, parody is a game. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Parody
Lesson
Satire
" 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. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Happy
Like
Love
" Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Know
Teacher
Class
" 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. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Girl
Mind
Good
" I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. "
Vladimir Nabokov
Think
You
Stronger