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

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.

His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.

A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

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?

My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.