01c. 1938 ADAnd I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancyVladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
02c. 1938 ADGod does not exist, as neither does our hereafter, that second bogey being as easily disposed of as the first. Indeed, imagine yourself just dead—and suddenly wide awake in Paradise where, wreathed in smiles, your dear dead welcome you. Now tell me, please, what guarantee do you possess that those beloved ghosts are genuine; that it is really your dear dead mother and not some petty demon mystifying you, masked as your mother and impersonating her with consummate art and naturalness? There is the rub, there is the horror; the more so as the acting will go on and on, endlessly; never, never, never, never, never will your soul in that other world be quite sure that the sweet gentle spirits crowding about it are not fiends in disguise, and forever, and forever, and forever shall your soul remain in doubt, expecting every moment some awful change, some diabolical sneer to disfigure the dear face bending over you.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
03c. 1938 ADIf I am not master of my life, not sultan of my own being, then no man's logic and no man's ecstatic fits may force me to find less silly my impossibly silly position: that of God's slave; no, not his slave even, but just a match which is aimlessly struck and then blown out by some inquisitive child, the terror of his toys.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
04c. 1938 ADThe 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...Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
05c. 1938 ADThere is yet another reason why I cannot, nor wish to, believe in God: the fairy tale about him is not really mine, it belongs to strangers, to all men; it is soaked through by the evil-smelling effluvia of millions of other souls that have spun about a little under the sun and then burst…Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
06c. 1938 ADAll my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
07c. 1938 ADBut soon the poltergeist ran out of ideas in connection with Aunt Maud and became, as it were, more eclectic. All the banal motions that objects are limited to in such cases, were gone through in this one. Saucepans crashed in the kitchen; a snowball was found (perhaps, prematurely) in the icebox; once or twice Sybil saw a plate sail by like a discus and land safely on the sofa; lamps kept lighting up in various parts of the house; chairs waddled away to assemble in the impassable pantry; mysterious bits of string were found on the floor; invisible revelers staggered down the staircase in the middle of the night; and one winter morning Shade, upon rising and taking a look at the weather, saw that the little table from his study upon which he kept Bible-like Webster open at M was standing in a state of shock outdoors, on the snow (subliminally this may have participated in the making of lines 5-12).I imagine, that during the period the Shades, or at least John Shade, experienced a sensation of odd instability as if parts of the everyday, smoothly running world had got unscrewed, and you became aware that one of your tires was rolling beside you, or that your steering wheel had come off.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
08c. 1938 ADRunning in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flightVladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
09c. 1938 AD...for she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
10c. 1938 ADHe loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
11c. 1938 ADThe best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
12c. 1938 AD...I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get rid of that book....Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
13c. 1938 ADHe loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
14c. 1938 ADFrom early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
15c. 1938 ADThey are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kissed on the trim turf of old-world mountainsides, on the innerspring moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks, and in so many cabanes in so so many beech forests. But in the Wilds of America the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart's buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of potential snakes--que dis-je,of semi-extinct dragons!--while the crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to gartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
16c. 1938 ADHuman thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
17c. 1938 ADI am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
18c. 1938 ADYou forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
19c. 1938 ADIn this very special self-hypnotic state there can be no question of getting out of touch with on[e]self and floating into a normal sleep (unless you are very tired at the start)Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
20c. 1938 ADAll my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus, that black-masked headsman binding me to the block; and if in the course of years I have got so used to my nightly ordeal as almost to swagger while the familiar axe is coming out of its great velvet-lined case, initially I had no such comfort or defense: I had nothing - save a door left slightly ajar into Mademoiselle's room. Its vertical line of meek light was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim, just as the soul dissolves in the blackness of sleep.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
21c. 1938 ADThe 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.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
22c. 1938 ADA 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.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
23c. 1938 ADI notice I may have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
24c. 1938 ADShe thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
