Sublime
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This friendship was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed, especially when we were not alone, by that gruffness which stems from what can be termed the dignity of the heart.
Vladimir Nabokov • Pale Fire (Vintage International)
The cause is given curtly, mid-sentence: ‘(picnic, lightning)’ and, after a paragraph of tender analogies about his dim recollections of her, she is never mentioned again. This bracketed tragedy is an instant shorthand for Humbert’s sensibility: his ruthless irony and black humour, a flippancy whose source is an inscrutable mix of callousness and
... See moreLaurence Scott • Picnic Comma Lightning: The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century
butterfly eyelash,
Vladimir Nabokov • Selected Poems
Our Prince was fond of Fleur as of a sister but with no soft shadow of incest or secondary homosexual complications. She
Vladimir Nabokov • Pale Fire (Penguin Modern Classics)
Observation is not always the mother of deduction.
Vladimir Nabokov • Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Vintage International)
Help me, Will. Pale Fire. Paraphrased, this evidently means: Let me look in Shakespeare for something I might use for a title. And the find is “pale fire.” But in which of the Bard’s works did our poet cull it? My readers must make their own research. All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens—in Zemblan! It certainly
... See moreVladimir Nabokov • Pale Fire (Vintage International)
Their dark silhouettes numbed the soft part of his brain, like a bee stinging and numbing a caterpillar, then laying eggs on the surface of its body. The bee larvae use the paralyzed caterpillar as a convenient source of food and devour it as soon as they’re born.