Quotes About Pnin

#1. 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

#2. All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.

Vladimir Nabokov

#3. 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

#4. '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

#5. Important lecture!' cried Pnin. 'What to do? It is a catastroph!

Vladimir Nabokov

#6. Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?

Vladimir Nabokov

#7. ( ... ) 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

#8. Make three correct guesses consecutively and you will establish a reputation as an expert.

Laurence J. Peter

#9. 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

#10. Give that woman an inch and she takes the entire British Isles.

Sarah Jane Stratford

#11. It is still more likely that a woman's power would be seen as aggression, and a man's power would be seen as assertion.

Jessye Norman

#12. It is hard to think of something as a gift when you have been tormented and imprisoned for it.

Cassandra Clare

#13. There are many premium writers, yes? Tolstoy, yes? He wrote War, and also Peace, which are both premium books.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#14. It was the blue of the sky that caught him first: a rapturous, painfully pure spike of color that hooked his eyes like fish and reeled them upward into the heights.

Josh Ritter

#15. Our nation's children are our greatest asset and our most precious treasure.

Christopher Dodd

#16. Dean: God exists without qualms. As we roll along this way, I am positive beyond doubt that everything will be taken care of for us - that even you, as you drive, fearful of the wheel - the thing will go along of itself and you won't go off the road and I can sleep.

Jack Kerouac

#17. God does not permit persecution to arise without sufficient reason...He was leading us by a way that we knew not; but it was none the less His way.

Hudson Taylor

#18. And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow. G. K. Chesterton

Leslie Parrott

#19. More planning shall give greater possibility of victory while less planning, lesser possibility of victory. So how about those without planning?

Sun Tzu

#20. The word planet should be reserved for the small number of truly important things in the solar system.

Mike Brown

#21. I can't look at you. I don't want to talk to you. I just want my things. I want to go home.-Blaire Wynn

Abbi Glines