Pnin Quotes & Sayings

She was looking at the unborn secret of the Buena Esperanza Pass, she knew that this was oil drawn out of shale by some method men had considered impossible. — Ayn Rand

An easy way to find your own style is to exaggerate yourself a bit and then find a balance. — Johan Lindeberg

Acting is exciting. It is different every time you do it. — Adam Lamberg

( ... ) after an early dinner at The Egg and We, a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure ( ... ) — Vladimir Nabokov

When you are following dharma, you will be happy, at peace, still inside. There will be a sense of purpose to your life. Difficulties will not seem unconquerable. — Frederick Lenz

Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin? — Vladimir Nabokov

During a match, you are in a permanent battle to fight back your everyday vulnerabilities, bottle up your human feelings. It's a kind of self-hypnosis, a game you play, with deadly seriousness, to disguise your own weaknesses from yourself, as well as from your rival. — Rafael Nadal I Farreras

When you enter a beloved novel many times, you can come to feel that you possess it, that nobody else has ever lived there. You try not to notice the party of impatient tourists trooping through the kitchen (Pnin a minor scenic attraction en route to the canyon Lolita), or that shuffling academic army, moving in perfect phalanx, as they stalk a squirrel around the backyard (or a series of squirrels, depending on their methodology). — Zadie Smith

You can't let haters stop you. — Quinton Jackson

Important lecture!' cried Pnin. 'What to do? It is a catastroph! — Vladimir Nabokov

'Pnin' by Vladimir Nabokov, which is a literally small book, fit right in my common law book. I would sit in class and read it. — Elizabeth Strout

What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself ... never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because ... the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind ... but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past. — Vladimir Nabokov

It is nothing but a kind of a microcosmos of communism - all that psychiatry', rumbled Pnin ... 'Why not leave their private sorrow to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess? — Vladimir Nabokov

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 the two he has. — Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended the destinies of the quick. — Vladimir Nabokov

All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train. — Vladimir Nabokov

My patient was one of those singular and unfortunate people who regard their heart ("a hollow, muscular organ," according to the gruesome definition in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, which Pnin's orphaned bag contained) with a queasy dread, a nervous repulsion, a sick hate, as if it were some strong slimy untouchable monster that one had to be parasitized with, alas. — Vladimir Nabokov