Vladimir Vladimirovič Nabokov: Frasi in inglese (pagina 8)

“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.”

“I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.”

“I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.”

“… memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.”

“If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”

“His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.”

“There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.”

“for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.”

“My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.”

“While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.”

“Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.”

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”

“The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.”

“Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care.”

“Years of secret suffering had taught me superhuman self-control.”

“Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.”

“Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.”

“while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space,
the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.”