They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kissed on the trim turf of old-world mountainsides, on the innerspring moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks, and in so many cabanes in so so many beech forests. But in the Wilds of America the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart's buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of potential snakes--que dis-je, of semi-extinct dragons! --while the crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to gartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike. . Vladimir Nabokov
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More Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov
  1. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
  2. I think it is all a matter of love the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes
  3. I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her —after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred— I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness...
  4. Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
  5. Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece
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