Speak, Memory Quotes
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."
"I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature."
"To love with all one’s soul and leave the rest to fate, was the simple rule she heeded."
"How small the cosmos, how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!"
"To fix correctly, in terms of time, some of my childhood recollections, I have to go by comets and eclipses, as historians do when they tackle the fragments of a saga."
"Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap."
"Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds."
"The future specialist in such dull literary lore as auto-plagiarism will like to collate a protagonist’s experience in my novel The Gift with the original event."
"Through the window of that index climbs a rose and sometimes a gentle wind ex ponto blows."
"In my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves."
"One evening at Ayvazovski’s villa near Feodosia, Aunt Praskovia met at dinner the twenty-eight-year-old Dr. Anton Chekhov whom she somehow offended in the course of a medical conversation."
"The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes."
"In the course of years, with the approach of a far more thorough and still more risible disintegration, I have grown so accustomed to my bedtime ordeal as almost to swagger while the familiar ax is coming out of its great velvet-lined double-bass case."
"Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals."
"I loathe Somnus, that black-masked headsman binding me to the block."
"The very darkness that was gathering outside seemed a waste product of Mr. Burness’ efforts to reach our house."
"The magic has endured, and whenever a grammar book comes my way, I instantly turn to the last page to enjoy a forbidden glimpse of the laborious student’s future, of that promised land where, at last, words are meant to mean what they mean."
"Mademoiselle’s room, both in the country and in town, was a weird place to me—a kind of hothouse sheltering a thick-leaved plant imbued with a heavy, enuretic odor."
"All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanor, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it."
"My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity."
"I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."
"Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration."
"The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me."
"Natural selection, in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior."
"When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in."
"The struggle that had gone on since my grandfather’s time to keep the park from reverting to the wild state always fell short of complete success."
"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another."
"In thinking of my successive tutors, I am concerned less with the queer dissonances they introduced into my young life than with the essential stability and completeness of that life."
"I see the tablecloth and the faces of seated people sharing in the animation of light and shade beneath a moving, a fabulous foliage."
"It is astounding how little the ordinary person notices butterflies."
"The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo’s natural members."
"The poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."
"The nearer my poem got to its completion, the more certain I became that whatever I saw before me would be seen by others."
"The process of orientation is an immemorial urge."
"The fervor I had been trying to render took over again and brought its medium back to an illusory life."
"A person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time."
"I was richly, serenely aware of my own manifold awareness."
"The poet’s melancholy daydreams led fatally to a rhyming line ending in roses or birches or thunderstorms."
"My poems were juvenile stuff, quite devoid of merit and ought never to have been put on sale."
"The excitement in the streets made one drunk with desire for the woods and the fields."
"Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction."
"The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free."
"The chessboard before him is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firmament."
"I remember slowly emerging from a swoon of concentrated chess thought, and there, on a great English board of cream and cardinal leather, the flawless position was at last balanced like a constellation."
"Everything around was very quiet; faintly dimpled, as it were, by the quality of my relief."
"In looking at it from my present tower I see myself as a hundred different young men at once."
"The long journey southward started tolerably well, with the heat still humming."
"The break in my own destiny affords me in retrospect a syncopal kick that I would not have missed for worlds."
"The eye of memory is so firmly focused upon a small figure squatting on the ground."
"The years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know."
"In the purity and vacuity of the less familiar hour, the shadows were on the wrong side of the street."
"I must know where I stand, where you and my son stand."
"Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love."
"I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position."
"The splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture."