“It was a brutal picture, a tug-of-war between two equal but opposing impulses. It had the ring of truth, however,”

“Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as enemies and equals?”

“What would have happened if Caverna had been torn by a civil war, the two opposed leaders housed in a single body?”

“In another Nabokov novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Sebastian's brother discovers two seemingly incongruous pictures in his dead brother's library: a pretty, curly-haired child playing with a dog and a Chinese man in the act of being beheaded. The two pictures remind us of the close relation between banality and brutality.”

“You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.”

“...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.”