πŸ“” Pale Fire

by Vladimir Nabokov

Quotes from this book

The young woodwose had now closed his eyes and was stretched out supine on the pool's marble margin; his Tarzan brief had been cast aside on the turf.
[…] the friendly and eloquent monarch would be interrupted by a pertussal "backdraucht" in a crowd of school-children.
Otar, a pleasant and cultured adeling with a tremendous nose and sparse hair, had his two mistresses with him
afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as flowergirls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the fireworks, and the pale upturned faces.
In her version of Donne's famous Holy Sonnet X composed in his widowery: […]
I saw a couple, later identified for me as Mr Colt, a local lawyer, and his wife, whose blundering Cadillac half entered my driveway before retreating in a flurry of luminous nictitation.
Yes, after a thorough perlustration of the loot that Andron and Niagarushka had obtained from the Queen's rosewood writing desk (mostly bills, and treasured snapshots, and those silly medals) a letter from the King did turn up.
I have never acknowledged printed praise though sometimes I longed to embrace the glowing image of this or that paragon of discernment; and I have never bothered to lean out of my window and empty my skoramis on some poor hack's pate.
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; / I was the smudge of ashen fluffβ€”and I / Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
That is why goetic magic does not always work. The demons in their prismatic malice betray the agreement between us and them, and we are again in the chaos of chance.
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Book Information
Publication Year
1962
Total Quotes
21