The Week… Into the deep with Vladimir Nabokov

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

Photo: steelcityhobbies

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

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.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

Photo: fpat

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

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