I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very proces...
And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: 'There is nothing softer than your heart.' And I lowered my gaze...
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
– Szeret mindent, amit a szép lányok szeretnek – mondta Van –, a bálokat, az orchideákat és a Cseresznyéskert-et.
بعضیها _ که من هم یکی از آنها هستم _ از قصههایی که پایان خوش دارند بدشان میآید. احساس میکنیم گول خوردهایم. روال بر ضرر است. تقدیر نباید متوقف شود. بهمنی که در مسیرش درست در چند متری بالای سر ی...
Но някъде отвъд кипналото щастие се съвещаваха смутени сенки — и колко съжалявам, че не се вслушах в тях!
Боже мой, как я ненавижу все это - лавки, вещи за стеклом, тупое лицо товара и в особенности церемониал сделки, обмен приторными любезностями до и после! А эти опущенные ресницы скромной цены... благо...
A shoe-shaped bath tub, within which I felt like Marat but with no white-necked maiden to stab me.
[...] należała jednak do tych kobiet, które łączą w sobie zdrową urodę z histeryczną łzawliwością, wybuchy liryczne z bardzo praktycznym, banalnym myśleniem, podły charakter z sentymentalizmem, ospałą...
You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy... in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs... the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecogn...
With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a grey neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples.
When, on a Sunday evening in May 1876, Anna throws herself under the freight train, she has existed more than four years since the beginning of the novel, but in the case of the Lyovins, during the sa...
We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous countr...
We are most artistically caged.
Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point in space, the poet sees everything that happens in one...
Thus it transpired that even Berlin could be mysterious. Within the linden's bloom the streetlight winks. A dark and honeyed hush envelops us. Across the curb one's passing shadow slinks: across a stu...
This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My Calender is getting confused. That mu...
Tenderness rounds out true triumph, gentleness lubricates genuine liberation: emotions that are not diagnostic of glory or passion in dreams.