Scott > Scott's Quotes

“There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“All the lessons of history in four sentences:
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.
The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.
The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”
― Charles A. Beard

“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“The lost glove is happy.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“Dear Jesus, do something.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.”
― Nabokov Vladimi, Lolita

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Words without experience are meaningless.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

“Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

“Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs. ”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“It must surely be true that there is no such collective domain of joy as there is of sorrow. You cant be sure that another man's happiness resembles your own. But where the collective of pain is concerned there can be little doubt at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“I agreed with him that there wasnt a whole lot good you could say about old age and he said he knew one thing and I said what is that. And he said it dont last long. I waited for him to smile but he didnt.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening oneself. If you carry your past into battle you are riding to your death. Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision. Travel light. A few ideas are enough. Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it. And that day is coming in which there will be no remedy at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“We’ve been a long time without a nuclear war. Yes. Well, it’s probably like any bankruptcy. The longer you’re able to put it off the worse it’s going to be. The next great war wont arrive until everyone who remembers the last one is dead.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“He said that a Godless life would not prepare one for a Godless death. To that I have no answer.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“I know that to be female is an older thing even than to be human.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Where he walked the tideline at dusk the last red reaches of the sun flared slowly out along the sky to the west and the tidepools stood like spills of blood. He stopped to look back at his bare footprints. Filling with water one by one. The reefs seemed to move slowly in the last hours and the late colors of the sun drained away and then the sudden darkness fell like a foundry shutting down for the night.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Its general vacuity aside there seems to be a ceiling to well-being. My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“I think what is being pointed out is that human consciousness and reality are not the same thing.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris