This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
As happens in dreams, when a perfectly harmless object inspires us with fear and thereafter is frightening every time we dream of it (and even in real life retains disquieting overtones), so Dreyer's presence became for Franz a refined torture, an implacable menace. [ ... H]e could not help cringing when, with a banging of doors in a dramatic draft, Martha and Dreyer entered simultaneously from two different rooms as if on a too harshly lit stage. Then he snapped to attention and in this attitude felt himself ascending through the ceiling, through the roof, into the black-brown sky, while, in reality, drained and empty, he was shaking hands with Martha, with Dreyer. He dropped back on his feet out of that dark nonexistence, from those unknown and rather silly heights, to land firmly in the middle of the room (safe, safe!) when hearty Dreyer described a circle with his index finger and jabbed him in the navel; Franz mimicked a gasp and giggled; and as usual Martha was coldly radiant. His fear did not pass but only subsided temporarily: one incautious glance, one eloquent smile, and all would be revealed, and a disaster beyond imagination would shatter his career. Thereafter whenever he entered this house, he imagined that the disaster had happened—that Martha had been found out, or had confessed everything in a fit of insanity or religious self-immolation to her husband; and the drawing room chandelier invariably met him with a sinister refulgence.
Inspiration | Story |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I had once been splintered into a million beings and objects. Today I am one, tomorrow I shall splinter again. And thus everything in the world decants and modulates. That day I was on the crest of a wave. I knew that all my surroundings were notes of one and the same harmony, knew - secretly - the source and the inevitable resolution of the sounds assembled for an instant, and the new chord that would be engendered by each of the dispersing notes. My soul's musical ear knew and comprehended everything.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
For better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The sense of literary creation is to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.
Experience | Nothing | Thought | Wrong | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up.
Loneliness | Man | Thought | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.
Death | Intelligence | Man | Mind | Problems | Regard | Thought | Will | Words | Work | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
Death | Detachment | Heart | Love | Order | Peace | Sanity | Thought | Woman | World | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Darkness | Day | Death | Ends | Life | Life | Panic | Progress | Suicide | Thought | Time | Afraid | Old | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
This, to use an American term in which discovery, retribution, torture, death, eternity appear in the shape of a singularly repulsive nutshell, was it.
Children | Darkness | Fate | Husband | Joy | Pain | Reason | Tenderness | Thought | Fate | Loss | Thought |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.
Ignorance | Spirit | Superstition | Thought | Virginity | Virtue | Virtue | Thought |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
He wanted to know how they prayed to God in El Dorado. We do not pray to him at all, said the reverend sage. We have nothing to ask of him. He has given us all we want, and we give him thanks continually.
Affectation | Good | Heart | Knowledge | Sense | Thought | Will | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor.
Energy | Love | Man | Mind | Mortal | Position | Sense | Space | Thought | Time | Absurdity | Thought |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
They who say all men are equal speak an undoubted truth, if they mean that all have an equal right to liberty, to their property, and to their protection of the laws. - But they are mistaken if they think men are equal in their station and employments, since they are not so by their talents.
It is not sufficient that a few in society penetrate to the depths of living and offer fascinating accounts about the oneness of all beings. What is necessary in these critical times is that all sensitive and caring people make a personal discovery of the fact of oneness and allow compassion to flow in their lives. When compassion and realization of oneness becomes the dynamic of human relationship, then humankind will evolve.
Attention | Care | Children | Freedom | Greed | Harmony | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Mind | Mistrust | Need | Peace | Responsibility | Study | Thought | Will | Thought |