The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.

Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

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

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison.

Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.