More Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
And the rest is rust and stardust.
The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.
Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
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.
Words without experience are meaningless.
