One cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very pr...
And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
How can I write about this when I am afraid of not having time to finish and of stirring up all these thoughts in vain?
And finally there was the sleepless nightwhen i decided to explore and fightthe foul, the inadmissible abyss,devoting all my twisted life to thisone task. today i'm sixty-one. waxwingsare berry-peckin...
[…] az ostobaság ugyanis mindig a zsúfoltság szinonimája, és semmi sincs jobban tele, mint egy üres fej.
[...] odrębność stanowi jedną z podstawowych cech życia. Jeżeli nie otacza nas powłoka cielesna, musimy umrzeć. Człowiek egzystuje tylko wtedy, kiedy jest odizolowany od otoczenia. Czaszka to nasz heł...
Zembla is a site devoted to the life and works of author, translator, and lepidopterist.
Years of secret suffering had taught me superhuman self-control.
Wspomnienie nie dawało mu spokoju. Można je było wytrzymać przez chwilę i to tylko z perspektywy nieuleczalnej choroby, w wyraźnym przeczuciu nadchodzącej śmierci.
We must distinguish between ‘sentimental’ and ‘sensitive’. A sentimentalist may be a perfect brute in his free time. A sensitive person is never a cruel person. Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep ov...
We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet...
Now, when it was too late, and Life's shops were closed, he regretted not having bought a certain book he had always wanted; never having gone through an earthquake, a fire, a train accident; never ha...
It happens that over a long period you are promised a great success, in which from the very start you do not believe, so dissimilar is it from the rest of fate's offering, and if from time to time you...
In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cr...
I was always lonely and I am lonely still.
Certainly it’s all in bloom, certainly we’ll go. For aren’t you and I gods? . . . I sense in my blood the rotation of unexplorable universes. . . .
By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane.
But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are t...