
Pale Fire (Vintage International)

I’m ready to become a floweret Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.
Vladimir Nabokov • Pale Fire (Vintage International)
Now I shall speak of evil as none has Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz; The white-hosed moron torturing a black Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac; Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools; Music in supermarkets; swimming pools; Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, 930 Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, fra
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A wrench, a rift—that’s all one can foresee. Maybe one finds le grand néant; maybe Again one spirals from the tuber’s eye.
Vladimir Nabokov • Pale Fire (Vintage International)
In later years it started to decline: Buddhism took root. A medium smuggled in 640 Pale jellies and a floating mandolin. Fra Karamazov, mumbling his inept All is allowed, into some classes crept; And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb, A school of Freudians headed for the tomb.
Vladimir Nabokov • Pale Fire (Vintage International)
Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as None has cried out. Now I shall try what none Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.
Vladimir Nabokov • Pale Fire (Vintage International)
120 A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.
Vladimir Nabokov • Pale Fire (Vintage International)
From the second story of my house the Shades’ living-room window remained clearly visible so long as the branches of the deciduous trees between us were still bare, and almost every evening I could see the poet’s slippered foot gently rocking. One inferred from it that he was sitting with a book in a low chair but one never managed to glimpse more
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I love you when you call me to admire A jet’s pink trail above the sunset fire.