01c. 1938 ADNowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
02c. 1938 ADAnd yet I shall try again: "they are murdering me!"--all right, all together once more: "they are murdering me!" and again: "murdering"... I want to write this in such a way that you will cover your ears, your membranaceous, simian ears that you hide under strands of beautiful feminine hair--but I know them, I see them, I pinch them, the cold little things, I worry them with my fingers to somehow warm them, bring them to life, render them human, force them to hear me.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
03c. 1938 ADI was an infant when my parents died.Thye both were ornithologists. I've triedSo often to evoke them that todayI have a thousand parents. Sadly theyDissolve in their own virtues and recede,But certain words, chance words I hear or read,Such as "bad heart" always to him refer,And "cancer of the pancreas" to her.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
06c. 1938 ADAll of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
07c. 1938 ADThe Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman's effort.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
08c. 1938 ADI would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
09c. 1938 ADYou must be careful. There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
10c. 1938 ADThe theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole with greater or lesser distinction (like the swell and fall of uneven breathing), now rolling up this image, now that, letting it ride in the wind, or even tossing it out on the shore, where it seems to move and live for a minute on its own and presently is drawn back again by grey seas where it sinks or is strangely transfigured.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
11c. 1938 ADIn our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee:“Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight.”It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability - a most singular case, I presume - of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
12c. 1938 ADMy darling, what a cat they have! Something perfectly stupendous. Siamese, in colour dark beige, or taupe, with chocolate paws and the tail the same. Moreover, his tail is comparatively short, so his croup has something of a little dog, or rather, a kangaroo, and that’s its colour, too. And that special silkiness of short fur, and some very tender white tints on its folds, and wonderful clear-blue eyes, turning transparently green towards evening, and a pensive tenderness of its walk, a sort of heavenly circumspection of movement. An amazing, sacred animal, and so quiet – it’s unclear what he is looking at with those eyes filled to the brim with sapphire water.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
13c. 1938 ADIt was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
14c. 1938 ADOn such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen mud and horror in my heart.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
15c. 1938 ADLighted 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.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
16c. 1938 ADEvery author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
17c. 1938 ADGood by-aye!" she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
18c. 1938 ADLet at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
19c. 1938 ADFor I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
20c. 1938 ADBut as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years - problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space - and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
21c. 1938 ADLogical reasoning may be a most convenient means of mental communication for covering short distances, but the curvature of the earth, alas, is reflected even in logic: an ideally rational progression of thought will finally bring you back to the point of departure where you return aware of the simplicity of genius, with a delightful sensation that you have embraced truth, while actually you have merely embraced your own self... anything you might term a deduction already exposes the flaw: logical development inexorably becomes an envelopment.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
23c. 1938 ADThe nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
24c. 1938 ADThe days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation can.Vladimir Nabokov / quote ↗
