Because you took advantage of a sinner because you took advantage because you took because you took advantage of my disadvantage … “That’s good, you … - Vladimir Nabokov

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Because you took advantage of a sinner because you took advantage because you took because you took advantage of my disadvantage … “That’s good, you know. That’s damned good.” … when I stood Adam-naked before a federal law and all its stinging stars “Oh, grand stuff!” … Because you took advantage of a sin when I was helpless moulting moist and tender hoping for the best dreaming of marriage in a mountain state aye of a litter of Lolitas … “Didn’t get that.” Because you took advantage of my inner essential innocence because you cheated me — “A little repetitious, what? Where was I?” Because you cheated me of my redemption because you took her at the age when lads play with erector sets “Getting smutty, eh?” a little downy girl still wearing poppies still eating popcorn in the colored gloam where tawny Indians took paid croppers because you stole her from her wax-browed and dignified protector spitting into his heavy-lidded eye ripping his flavid toga and at dawn leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort the awfulness of love and violets remorse despair while you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away because of all you did because of all I did not you have to die

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About Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (22 April (O.S. 10 April) 1899 – 2 July 1977) was a Russian-American writer. He wrote his first literary works in Russian, but gained international prominence as a masterly prose stylist for the novels he composed in English; his Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as one of the most important novels of the 20th century.

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Also Known As

Native Name: Владимир Владимирович Набоков
Alternative Names: Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Vladimir Sirin Vl. Sirin Wladimir Nabokoff-Sirin V. Sirin Nabokov
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Additional quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me - not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong site of the road.

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As happens in dreams, when a perfectly harmless object inspires us with fear and thereafter is frightening every time we dream of it (and even in real life retains disquieting overtones), so Dreyer's presence became for Franz a refined torture, an implacable menace. [ ... H]e could not help cringing when, with a banging of doors in a dramatic draft, Martha and Dreyer entered simultaneously from two different rooms as if on a too harshly lit stage. Then he snapped to attention and in this attitude felt himself ascending through the ceiling, through the roof, into the black-brown sky, while, in reality, drained and empty, he was shaking hands with Martha, with Dreyer. He dropped back on his feet out of that dark nonexistence, from those unknown and rather silly heights, to land firmly in the middle of the room (safe, safe!) when hearty Dreyer described a circle with his index finger and jabbed him in the navel; Franz mimicked a gasp and giggled; and as usual Martha was coldly radiant. His fear did not pass but only subsided temporarily: one incautious glance, one eloquent smile, and all would be revealed, and a disaster beyond imagination would shatter his career. Thereafter whenever he entered this house, he imagined that the disaster had happened — that Martha had been found out, or had confessed everything in a fit of insanity or religious self-immolation to her husband; and the drawing room chandelier invariably met him with a sinister refulgence.

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