In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the h...
I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me.
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible
We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things.
The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]
[D]avid began to argue, with the whining intonations of German astonishment, [...] that everyone did it.
Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, pinging pebbles at an empty can.
I appeal to parents: never, never say, Hurry up, to a child. (62)
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 fo...
[...] and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds.
Your voice, through the beelike hum, was remote and anxious. It kept sliding into the distance and vanishing. I spoke to you with tightly shut eyes, and felt like crying. My love for you was the throb...
All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
It is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the a of the first syllable as a misprint and then tries to restore the symmetrical sequence by triplicating the o- fi...
All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
A late arrival had the impression of lots of loud people unnecessarily grouped within a smoke-blue space between two mirrors gorged with reflections. Because, I suppose, Cynthia wished to be the young...
He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing c...
The crickets kept crepitating; from time to time there came a sweet whiff of burning juniper; and above the black alpestrine steppe, above the silken sea, the enormous, all-engulfing sky, dove-gray wi...
A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps...
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