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Chris Lavergne

4,407 Quotes
President of Thought.is
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4,407 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Nabokov's interview. (10) Time[1969]
Tagged: Insanity, Balancing Your Craziness
“A subtle sport can be derived from constantly fighting temptation while constantly dreaming of somehow, sometime, somewhere, yielding to it.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Ada
Tagged: Temptation, Desire
“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”
— T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Tagged: Word Failure, The Impossibility of Communication, When Words Fail
“My aim was to compose a kind of novella in the form of a treatise on the Texture of Time, an investigation of its veily substance, with illustrative metaphors gradually increasing, very gradually building up a logical love story, going from past to present, blossoming as a concrete story, and just as gradually reversing analogies and disintegrating again into bland abstraction.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Ada
Tagged: What Is Ada?
“The drug had worn off: its aftereffects are not pleasant, combining as they do physical fatigue with a certain starkness of thought as if all color were drained from the mind.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Ada
Tagged: Negative Descriptions of Drugs, Drug Hangover
“Time is anything but the popular triptych: a no-longer existing Past, the durationless point of the Present, and a ‘not-yet’ that may never come. No. There are only two panels. The Past (ever-existing in my mind) and the Present (to which my mind gives duration and, therefore, reality). If we make a third compartment of fulfilled expectation, the foreseen, the foreordained, the faculty of prevision, perfect forecast, we are still applying our mind to the Present.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Ada
Tagged: Time, (Paradigms of Argument Value Duration), Time Is A Diptych, Unconventional Understandings of Time, No Future
“The act of artistic correction enhances the pang of the Present.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Ada
Tagged: Ways We Massage Memory, Art Recreates The World
“Memory: Decalcomaniac romantic vividness.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Ada
Tagged: Décalcomanie, Clever Word Usage, Describing Memory, Memory
“The future is but a quack at the court of Chronos.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Ada
Tagged: The Future Does Not Exist, No Future, Metaphors, Time, (Examples of Good Tags)
“'To be’ means to know one ‘has been.'”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Ada
Tagged: The Meaning Of Life, To Be