Nabokov's "Real Life"

Just a few bullets re things that pleased or tickled me (this time around) in Nabokov's (ECRIVAIN'S) The Real Life of Sebastian Knight:

• and by the way how queer it is when you look at an old picture postcard (like the one I have placed on my desk to keep the child of memory amused for a moment) to consider the haphazard way Russian cabs had of turning whenever they liked, anywhere and anyhow, so that instead of the straight, self-conscious stream of modern traffic one sees--on this painted photograph--a dream-wide street with droshkies all awry under incredibly blue skies, which, farther away, melt automatically into a pink flush of mnemonic banality
• home only meaning to her the comfort of constant change
• a little black chess-knight drawn in ink
• eucalyptus, its bark half stripped away, as seems to be always the case with this sort of tree
• Lausanne
• water-color view of Chillon castle
• The Doubtful Asphodel
• "submental grunt"
• longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words
• The eye-spot of his awakening
• "Conradish" and suggested his leaving out the "con" and cultivating the "radish" in future works
• things like that are the darlings of oblivion
• Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale
• X.'s inner world (which is no more than a tube-station during rush hours)
• The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman's effort
• the bridging of the abyss lying between expression and thought
• a red-capped German gnome peeping bright-eyed at her from among the dead leaves of a hollow
• "No, Leslie," says Sebastian from the floor, "I'm not dead. I have finished building a world, and this is my Sabbath rest."