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Professor Pnin had this habit of changing his lodgings every so often. Nabokov writes:
'The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglenooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody.'

'There are some beloved women whose eyes, by a chance blend of brilliancy and shape, affect us not directly, not at the moment of shy perception, but in a delayed and cumulative burst of light when the heartless person is absent, and the magic agony abides, and its lenses and lamps are installed in the dark.'

'This sensation had the sharpness of retrospective detail that is said to be the dramatic privilege of drowning individuals, especially in the former Russian Navy—a phenomenon of suffocation that a veteran psychoanalyst, whose name escapes me, has explained as being the subconsciously evoked shock of one’s baptism which causes an explosion of intervening recollections between the first immersion and the last.'

'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 first 100 pages were just character introductions, and the next 100 or so seems to have been inked down for the express purpose of coloring those characters with different shades and depths. Yes, the narrative has proceeded, but it isn't really the highlight. And yet, it has been riveting. Speaks volumes about the command that Dostoevsky had over his craft.

As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all.

It may be that there have been many moonstruck and misleading ideals that have from time to time perplexed mankind. But assuredly there has been no ideal in practice so moonstruck and misleading as the ideal of practicality.

The self with which humans identify is a construction of society and memory. Forming an image of themselves in infancy and childhood, they seek happiness by preserving and strengthening that self-image. But the image they have of themselves is not the reality of their bodies or their lives, and chasing after it can lead not to fulfilment but to self-frustration.

The denial of death and the division of the human soul go together. Dreading anything that reminds them of their mortality, humans push much of their experience into an unconscious part of themselves. Life becomes a struggle to stay in the dark. Not needing such darkness within themselves, cats on the other hand are nocturnal creatures that live in the light of day.

Whereas cats live by following their nature, humans live by suppressing theirs. That, paradoxically, is their nature.

Instead of being a sign of their inferiority, the lack of abstract thinking among cats is a mark of their freedom of mind. Thinking in generalities slides easily into a superstitious faith in language. Much of the history of philosophy consists of the worship of linguistic fictions. Relying on what they can touch, smell and see, cats are not ruled by words.

Man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s soul. And without considering the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, he snatches at the first approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible and says: “This is the cause!”

In historic events, the rule forbidding us to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is specially applicable. Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in a historic event never understands its significance. If he tries to realize it his efforts are fruitless.

It sometimes happens in human history - though parallels may be dangerous - that when the natural road towards human fulfillment is blocked, human beings retreat into themselves, and try to create inwardly that world which some evil fate has denied them externally.

'There is nothing, nothing certain but the nothingness of all that is comprehensible to us, and the grandeur of something incomprehensible, but more important' : says our 'philosopher' Tolstoy through the musings of fatally injured Prince Andrey.

"Faith—in life, in other people, and in oneself—is the attitude of
allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its
own time. This is, of course, risky because life and other people do not
always respond to faith as we might wish. Faith is always a gamble
because life itself is a gambling game with what must appear, in the
hiding aspect of the game, to be colossal stakes."

If not anything, it is certainly thought-provoking.

"When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools."
~ William Shakespeare, King Lear

Entering 1916 and already Shakespearean verses have started to resonate deep within, as the horrors of WW1 reveal themselves almost shamelessly.