Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1958, p. 27.
This quotation may be apocryphal and not real. We have not been able to find an eyewitness or even a quotation the citation of which gave a date or suggested how the quote was ever made public given that it passed between these two men. However it is so frequently quoted that we have decided to include it. A further argument in its favor is that it fits the circumstances of the time. FDR had given Hopkins a huge budget and told Hopkins to get the American people working again. Hopkins did not believe in payments to the able bodied unless worked and his programs created an astounding array of jobs for the unemployed to do ranging from fixing benches in parks to writing poetry about poverty. He spend more money than any human being in history and started and implemented a nationwide program at a pace that has never been matched, Incredibly, no one was ever able to find any dishonesty in the administration, but it took years for the information of exactly what had going on at the local level to filter back to Washington. So the quote is plausible factually. Style-wise Hopkins was brutally honest with Roosevelt and others so well might have admitted that he did not know all that was going on in his programs. See {642829}.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (Владимир Сирин), was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Russia, he wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–1938) while living in Berlin. He achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States and beginning to write in English. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945, but he and his wife returned to Europe in 1961, settling in Montreux, Switzerland.
