Comme l’on serait savant si l’on connaissait bien seulement cinq à six livres. ( How wise one might be if one knew thoroughly only some half of a dozen books

power of facing unpleasant facts.” True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we’re lucky) to make the...

The Russian-born novelist’s writing habits were famously peculiar. Beginning in 1950, he composed first drafts in pencil on ruled index cards, which he stored in long file boxes. Since Nabokov claimed, he pictured an entire...

He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying...

I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.

For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, “pinging” pebbles at an empty can.

One last word,’ I said in my horrible careful English, ‘are you quite, quite sure that—well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but—well—some day, any day, you will not come to live with...

Good by-aye!” she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this.

I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.