{"author":"Vladimir Nabokov","author_id":"Vladimir+Nabokov","total_quotes":218,"quotes":[{"text":"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.","author":"Vladimir Nabokov","tags":["abyss","afterlife","calm","common-sense","cradle","darkness","death","eternity","existence","life","life-after-death","light","man"],"id":2057,"author_id":"Vladimir+Nabokov"},{"text":"Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight.","author":"Vladimir Nabokov","tags":["childhood","girls","running","wild","youth"],"id":2344,"author_id":"Vladimir+Nabokov"},{"text":"My 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.","author":"Vladimir Nabokov","tags":["cats","vera-nabokov","vladimir-nabokov"],"id":6761,"author_id":"Vladimir+Nabokov"},{"text":"Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.","author":"Vladimir Nabokov","tags":["great"],"id":10769,"author_id":"Vladimir+Nabokov"},{"text":"And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.","author":"Vladimir Nabokov","tags":["birth","child","consciousness","love"],"id":17712,"author_id":"Vladimir+Nabokov"},{"text":"It 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.","author":"Vladimir Nabokov","tags":["guilt","humbert-humbert","lolita","metaphor","simile"],"id":21248,"author_id":"Vladimir+Nabokov"},{"text":"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.","author":"Vladimir Nabokov","tags":["books","language","literature","reading","words"],"id":22302,"author_id":"Vladimir+Nabokov"},{"text":"I 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.","author":"Vladimir Nabokov","tags":["orphans","parents"],"id":25715,"author_id":"Vladimir+Nabokov"},{"text":"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.","author":"Vladimir Nabokov","tags":["simple","stupidity "],"id":25769,"author_id":"Vladimir+Nabokov"},{"text":"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.","author":"Vladimir Nabokov","tags":["nostalgia"],"id":25978,"author_id":"Vladimir+Nabokov"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":218,"pages":22,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}