I am a pickpocket, not a burglar.
I know something. I know something. But expression of it comes so hard !
The game of the gods. Infinite possibilities.
She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did.
Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams.
He tried to recall his best moments with her, but those moments were poisoned forever.
What’s so awful is that one can’t tear up the past by its roots. One can’t tear it out, but one can hide one’s memory of it.
She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine;... while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.
Did I ever mention that her bare arm bore the 8 of vaccination? That I loved her hopelessly? That she was only fourteen?
That Voice in the Mist rang out in the dimmest passage of my mind. It was but the echo of some possible truth, a timely reminder: don’t be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.
A horsefly applied itself, blind fool, to Pnin’s bald head, and was stunned by a smack of his meaty palm.
As soon as the pegs were driven in and the game started, the man was transfigured. From his habitual, slow, ponderous, rather rigid self, he changed into a terrifically mobile, scampering, mute, sly-visaged hunchback.
Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.
Two interesting characteristics distinguished Leonard Blorenge, Chairman of French Literature and Language; he disliked Literature and he had no French.
He was beloved not for any essential ability but for those unforgettable digressions of his, when he would remove his glasses to beam at the past while massaging the lenses of the present.
The Russian reader in old cultured Russia was certainly proud of Pushkin and of Gogol, but he was just as proud of Shakespeare or Dante, of Baudelaire or of Edgar Allan Poe, of Flaubert or of Homer, and this was the Russian reader’s strength. I have a certain personal interest in the question, for if my fathers had not been good readers, I would hardly be here today, speaking of these matters in this tongue.
I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses.
I am a very boring and unpleasant man, drowned in literature... But I love you.
It’s cold today, but in a spring way, and I love you.
Kisses, my love, deep ones, to the point of fainting-.