Interviewer:What surprises you in life?Nabokov:...the marvel of consciousness- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being.
Whenever a noise exceeds our processing abilities—we can’t decipher all the different sound waves hitting our hair cells—the mind . . . stops trying to understand the individual notes and seeks instea...
Writing of Pushkin, Nabokov once observed quite accurately that his subject was the threefold formula of human life: the irretrievability of the past, the insatiability of the present, and the unfores...