I’d like to taste the inside of your mouth.
Catalog
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (/nəˈbɔːkəf, ˈnæbəˌkɔːf, -ˌkɒf/; Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Набо́ков, pronounced [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr nɐˈbokəf], also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin; 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1899c – 2 July 1977) was a Russian-American novelist and entomologist. His first nine novels were in Russian, but he achieved international prominence after he began writing English prose. Nabokov's Lolita (1955), his most noted novel in English, was ranked fourth in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels; Pale Fire (1962) was ranked 53rd on the same list, and his memoir, Speak, Memory (1951), was listed eighth on the publisher's list of the 20th century's greatest nonfiction. He was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction seven times. Nabokov was an expert lepidopterist and composer of chess problems. 2Life and career 3Russia Nabokov was born on 22 April 1899 (10 April 1899 Old Style), in Saint Petersburg,b to a wealthy and prominent family of the Russian nobility. His father was the liberal lawyer, statesman, and journalist Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (1870–1922) and his mother was the heiress Yelena Ivanovna née Rukavishnikova, the granddaughter of a millionaire gold-mine owner. His father was a leader of the pre-Revolutionary liberal Constitutional Democratic Party and authored numerous books and articles about criminal law and politics. His cousins included the composer Nicolas Nabokov. His paternal grandfather, Dmitry Nabokov (1827–1904), had been Russia's Justice Minister in the reign of Alexander II. His paternal grandmother was the Baltic German Baroness Maria von Korff (1842–1926
Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive.
That despair of desire.
For the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.
We simply speak with our wounds; wounds procreate.
Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval. The regular throb itself merely brings back the miserable idea of measurement, but in between, something like…
What are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life.
Her brilliance, her genius. Of course, she had changed in four years, but he, too, had changed, by concurrent stages, so that their brains and senses stayed attuned and were to stay thus always, through all separations.
Whose eyes never dwell on you and yet pierce you.
No art and no genius would exist without vagaries.
I felt there was something dreadful, brutal, dark, and, yes, dreadful, about the whole thing.
What begins with a ‘de’ and rhymes more or less with a Silesian river ant?
He thought gravity had something to do with the blood circulation of a Supreme Being.
Ada, our ardors and arbors— sang through his brain.
Eighty years later he could still recall with the young pang of the original joy his falling in love with Ada. At ninety-four he liked retracing that first amorous summer not as a dream he had just had but as a recapitulation of consciousness to sustain him in the small gray hours between shallow…
The ardent pulses of the imagined maiden.
Very lightly he let his parched lips travel down her warm hair and hot nape. It was the sweetest, the strongest, the most mysterious sensation that the boy had ever experienced.
I, this eye-rolling toy.
He never spoke to her. He loved her madly.