Famous quotes containing the word nabokov:
“With a condescending grin he offered his hand, hardly bothering to sit up. I grasped it only because it provided me with the curious sensation of Narcissus fooling Nemesis by helping his image out of the brook.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The difference between human vision and the image perceived by the faceted eye of an insect may be compared with the difference between a half-tone block made with the very finest screen and the corresponding picture as represented by the very coarse screening used in common newspaper pictorial reproduction. The same comparison holds good between the way Gogol saw things and the way average readers and average writers see things.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)