Vladimir Nabokov Pnin Quotes

#1. ( ... ) 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

#2. It isn't ones complexion that makes someone beautiful, but what is within that brings that beauty out.

Hallie

#3. Some were made with skill and intelligence
Some with passion and charm
But they, they were raw, and strived to remain so ...

Pearl Pandya

#4. And sometimes holes want to get bigger, but Baz was wrong - sometimes they just want to be filled.

Rainbow Rowell

#5. I was heavy as a kid. I mean, I kind of got it together for a while there in my 20s and early 30s.

Jason Alexander

#6. 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

#7. Trust in my wisdom. I do not make mistakes. Love my uncertainty for it is not a mistake. It is my intent and will. Remember
nothing happens without my will. Be still. Do not ask to understand. Do not want to understand.

Sathya Sai Baba

#8. The modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic.

G.K. Chesterton

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

Vladimir Nabokov

#10. For me, and for many other people with disabilities, our status as disabled people is one of which we are fiercely proud.

Stella Young

#11. 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

#12. Cecy, help me to collect the ducklings, and put them back into the box! If we were to place your muff on top of them they will very likely believe it to be their mother, and settle down!

Georgette Heyer

#13. '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

#14. You are not mine to command. But the choice to kill always means closing the mind to the chance of a living alternative.

Janny Wurts

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

Vladimir Nabokov

#16. He was my tormentor and my solace; the creator of the dark and the light within.

C.J. Roberts

#17. 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

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

Vladimir Nabokov

#19. Understanding a person's hunger and responding to it is one of the most potent tools you'll ever discover for getting through to anyone you meet in business or your personal life.

Mark Goulston