#Quote
More Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.
There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.
My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.
Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
