Source: Lolita
“These two armies, the dark and the light, the armies of life and of death, collide eternally.”
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: One power descends and wants to scatter, to come to a standstill, to die. The other power ascends and strives for freedom, for immortality.
These two armies, the dark and the light, the armies of life and of death, collide eternally.
Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)
Context: The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack 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).
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), I : The Man of Flesh and Bone
Source: The Complex Vision (1920), Chapter I
Context: This swallowing up of life in nothingness, this obliteration of life by nothingness is what the emotion of malice ultimately desires. The eternal conflict between love and malice is the eternal contest between life and death. And this contest is what the complex vision reveals, as it moves from darkness to darkness.
“One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!”
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Man of Letters
Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 150
Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 16 “Between Drumner and Dremegole” (p. 233)
