From Nabokov's Speak Memory:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tell us that our existence is but a brief crak of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). (19)

I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was non other than the pure element of time. One shared it--just as excited bathers share shining sea water--with creatures that were not oneself that were joined to one by time's common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive. (21-22)

I would moreover submit that, in regard to the power of hoarding up impressions, Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them by giving them more than their share, in view of the cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known. (25)

...as if the singular were to thin to bear the load of her love.. (28)

...the sad (but interesting, I thought) necessity of blowing up tyrants... (29)

Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. (36)