A Quote by Vladimir Nabokov

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly . — © Vladimir Nabokov
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly .
In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures.
Give me a kiss, and to that kiss a score; Then to that twenty, add a hundred more: A thousand to that hundred: so kiss on, To make that thousand up a million. Treble that million, and when that is done, Let's kiss afresh, as when we first begun.
I judge wisely...as if nothin ever surprise me, Loungin, between two pillars of ivory. I'm lively, my dome piece is like buildin stones in Greece. My poems are deep, from ancient thrones I speak.
But you can't start. Only a baby can start. You and me - why, we're all that's been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that's us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can't start again.
The caterpillar dies so the butterfly could be born. And, yet, the caterpillar lives in the butterfly and they are but one. So, when I die, it will be that I have been transformed from the caterpillar of earth to the butterfly of the universe.
That's why 60,000 people go ape when the Stones play 'Satisfaction.' The songs are part of their legacy, and you fall back in love with them over the years.
It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?
17. Butterfly A butterfly fluttered its wings in a wind thick with the smell of seaweed. His dry lips felt the touch of the butterfly for the briefest instant, yet the wisp of wing dust still shone on his lips years later.
I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking straight into the camera, straight at me, and I remember thinking, that's it, that'll be me, you know, that'll be me.
And this is a kiss like none before, a kiss that could overcome the dark of deep space night. It's a falling star, flame, ice. It's pure as water from a snow-fed mountain spring. This is what you dream a kiss to be. To have a kiss just like this each and every day! How satisfying life would be.
Who are you, gaijin? What do you know about honor?' 'I'm called Chocho,' Will said... 'Chocho?' Arisaka shouted, goaded beyond control. 'Butterfly? Then die, Butterfly!
Girl, when he gives you kisses twain, use one, and let the other stay; And hoard it, for moons die, red fades, and you may need a kiss—some day.
Hour of Stars (1920) The round silence of night, one note on the stave of the infinite. Ripe with lost poems, I step naked into the street. The blackness riddled by the singing of crickets: sound, that dead will-o'-the-wisp, that musical light perceived by the spirit. A thousand butterfly skeletons sleep within my walls. A wild crowd of young breezes over the river.
Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
People think fashion shows take hours - it's 15 minutes. You walk in, do red carpet, take the pictures, you sit down... and then it's over.
A decade ago, my poems were precious little boxes, small and claustrophobic, completely inward gazing. I didn't possess the command to speak beyond the self. Over the years, my poems have stretched out, grown broader and grander. The intervening years of living and aging - with their portions of tragedy, triumph, and shipwreck - have earned me both the authority and the necessity to write on a cosmic scale.
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