I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants.… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
Well, [Dear], our pentameter may seemto foreign ears as if it could not rousethe limp iambus from its pyrrhic dream.But close your eyes and listen to the line.The melody unwinds; the middle wordis marvelously long and serpentine:you hear one beat, but you have also heardthe shadow of another, then the thirdtouches the gong, and then… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
Days like this give sight a rest and allow other senses to function more freely. Earth and sky were drained of all color. It was either raining or pretending to rain or not raining at all, yet still appearing to rain in a sense that only certain […] dialects can either express verbally or not… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
My love for you was the throbbing, welling warmth of tears. That is how I imagined paradise: silence and tears, and the warm silk of your knees. This you could not comprehend. — Vladimir Nabokov, Beneficence (Stories of Vladimir Nabokov) Knopf 24 October 1995.
…my Lolita remarked: “You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own”; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert’s Wanted” Poem Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.Age: five thousand three hundred days.Profession: none, or “starlet.” Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze?Why are you hiding, darling?(I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze,I cannot get out, said the starling). Where are you riding, Dolores Haze?What make is the magic carpet?Is a… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. — Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita. (Olympia Press… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
Oh, but she had been so pretty in the weaving of those delicate spells, in the dreamy performance of her enchantments… — Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita. (Olympia Press 1955)
The 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, Lolita. (Olympia Press 1955)
Her painted eyelids were closed. A tear of no particular meaning gemmed the hard top of her cheek. Nobody could tell what went on in that little head. Waves of desire rippled there. — Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)
The Vale of Soul-Making 