Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Philosophy is the invention of the rich. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I appeal to parents: never, never say, "Hurry up," to a child. (62) ~ Vladimir Nabokov

No man can bring about the perfect murder; chance, however, can do it. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Every great writer is a great deceiver ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It is desirable that the inmate should not have at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose content might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by the law to be guilty of rape. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale's white church tower when I looked around me for the last time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

My family despised Faberge objects as emblems of grotesque garishness. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

In a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

A bowling ball rolled through his head, diagonally from nape to temple; it paused and started back. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

If his Russian was music, his English was murder. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I think she always nursed a small mad hope. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I had always thought that wringing one's hands was a fictional gesture - the obscure outcome, perhaps, of some medieval ritual; but as I took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate meditation, this was the gesture ("look, Lord, at these chains!") that would have come nearest to the mute expression of my mood. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Nymphets do not occur in polar regions. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

On a Parisienne's Bookshelf
THERE ARE MANY BOOKS ON A PARISIENNE'S BOOKSHELF:

The books you so often claim you've read that you actually believe you have.
The books you read in school from which you remember only the main character's name.
The art books your parents give you each Christmas so you can get some "culture".
The art books that you bought yourself and which you really love.
The books that you've been promising yourself you'll read next summer … for the past ten years.
The books you bought only because you liked the title.
The books that you think makes you cool.
The books you read over and over again, and that evolve along with your life.
The books that remind you of someone you loved.
The books you keep for your children, just in case you ever have any.
The books whose first ten pages you've read so many times you know them by heart.
The books you own simply because you must and, taken together, form intangible proof that you are well read.
AND THEN THERE ARE THE BOOKS YOU HAVE READ, LOVED, AND WHICH ARE A PART OF YOUR IDENTITY:

The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
Belle du Seigneur, Albert Cohen
Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
L'Écume des jours, Boris Vian
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand C ~ Caroline De Maigret

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Look at this tangle of thorns. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

But nobody yet had been able to dig down to what was most captivating about her: this was the mysterious ability of her soul to apprehend in life only that which had once attracted and tormented her in childhood, the time when the soul's instinct is infallible; to seek out the amusing and the touching: to feel constantly an intolerable, tender pity for the creature whose life is helpless and unhappy; to feel across hundreds of miles that somewhere in Sicily a thin-legged little donkey with a shaggy belly is being brutally beaten. Whenever she did come across a creature that was being hurt, she experienced a kind of legendary eclipse - when inexplicable night comes down and ash flies and blood appears on the walls - and it seemed that if at once, at once, she did not help, did not cut short another's torture (the existence of which it was absolutely impossible to explain in a world so conducive to happiness), her heart would not stand it, and she would die. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things - how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver - and this inability enhanced my oppression. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

This twinned twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world's socket.

Through peacocked lashes I saw the dazzling diamond reflection of the low sun on the round back of a parked automobile. To all kinds of things a vivid pictorial sense had been restored by the sponge of the thaw. Water in overlapping festoons flowed down one sloping street and turned gracefully into another. With ever so slight a note of meretricious appeal, narrow passages between buildings revealed treasures of brick and purple. I remarked for the first time the humble fluting - last echoes of grooves on the shafts of columns - ornamenting a garbage can, and I also saw the rippling upon its lid - circles diverging from a fantastically ancient center. Erect, dark-headed shapes of dead snow (left by the blades of a bulldozer last Friday) were lined up like rudimentary penguins along the curbs, above the brilliant vibration of live gutters.

I walked up, and I walked down, and I walked straight into a delicately dying sky, and finally the sequence of observed and observant things brought me, at my usual eating time, to a street so distant from my usual eating place that I decided to try a restaurant which stood on the fringe of the town. Night had fallen without sound or ce ~ Vladimir Nabokov

He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The worst madman is the one who fails to consider the possibility of somebody else being mad too. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Stirless, I stand at the window, and in the black bowl of the sky glows like a golden drop of honey the mellow moon ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Time means succession, and succession, change: Hence timelessness is bound to disarrange Schedules of sentiment. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Suddenly, as Avis clung to her father's neck and ear while, with a casual arm, the man enveloped his lumpy and large offspring, I saw Lolita's smile lose all its light and become a frozen little shadow of itself, and the fruit knife slipped off the table and struck her with its silver handle a freak blow on the ankle which made her gasp, and crouch head forward, and then, jumping on one leg, her face awful with the preparatory grimace which children hold till the tears gush, she was gone - to be followed at once and consoled in the kitchen by Avis who had such a wonderful fat pink dad and a small chubby brother, and a brand-new baby sister, and a home, and two grinning dogs, and Lolita had nothing. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her ~ Vladimir Nabokov

He could swear he did not look back, could not - by any optical chance, or in any prism - have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture - which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never - consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The muse of invention handed me a rifle and I shot a white bear who sat down and said: Ah. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The satisfaction of a special Pninian craving. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

and he, Hugh Person....began to undress her in the motels of his mind ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Speaking of novels,' I said, 'you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust's rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described - by Cocteau, I think - as "a mirage of suspended gardens," and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski's (and Lyovin's) thick neck, and a cupid's buttocks for cheeks; but - and now let me finish sweetly - we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking "human interest": it is there, it is there - maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Being mad, he failed to take into account the scheming of irresponsible politicians. Being mad, he believed that other governments would act in accordance with the principles of mercy and common sense. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

He was a noisy robust little man with a gleam of real talent concealed in the messy obscurity of his verse. But because he did his best to shock people with his monstrous mass of otiose words (he was the inventor of the "submental grunt" as he called it), his main output seems now so nugatory, so false, so old-fashioned (super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others) that his true value is only remembered by a few scholars who admire the magnificent translations of English poems made by him at the very outset of his literary career, - ~ Vladimir Nabokov

They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so as to be overheard by anyone who might be listening, that they were contemplating moving, when all at once the fiend was gone, as happens with the moskovett, that bitter blast, that colossus of cold air that blows on our eastern shores throughout March, and then one morning you hear the birds, and the flags hang flaccid, and the outlines of the world are again in place. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born ... ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I found Dolores Haze at the kitchen table, consuming a wedge of pie, with her eyes fixed on her script. They rose to meet mine with a kind of celestial vapidity. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

An oak is a tree. A rose is a flower. A deer is an animal. A sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable.

P. Smirnovsky, A Textbook of Russian Grammar ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Lighted advertisements went running up dark red facades and dissipating again. He would pass girls; he would turn to look; but the prettier the face, the harder it was to take the plunge. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

My mind lay limp in an empty world. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

If I dwell at some length on the tremors and gropings of that distant night, it is because I insist upon proving that I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets-not crime's prowling ground. Had I reached my goal, my ecstasy would have been all softness, a case of internal combustion of which she would hardly have felt the heat, even if she were wide awake. But I still hoped she might gradually be engulfed in a completeness of stupor that would allow me to taste more than a glimmer of her. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I almost said - trying to find some casual remark - 'I wonder sometimes what has become of the little McCoo girl, did she ever get better?' - but stopped in time lest she rejoin: 'I wonder sometimes what has become of the little Haze girl ... ~ Vladimir Nabokov

All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

In harmony there is nothing strange. And life is a vast harmony. I've understood this. But, you see- the moulded whimsy of a frieze on a portico keeps us from recognizing, sometimes, the symmetry of the whole ... ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

All religions are based on obsolete terminology. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

No you can't take a pistol and plug a girl you don't even know simply because she attracts you. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Zembla is a site devoted to the life and works of author, translator, and lepidopterist. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

For we die every day; oblivion thrives 520 Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives, And our best yesterdays are now foul piles Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The problem lies not with the characters within the novel, but with the reader itself. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

There is only one school: that of talent. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously; reveling in the new life-harmony which I was creating. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I love you, I'm waiting for you unbearably. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes) "we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed." " ... Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying here." "There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

As far back as I can remember myself - and I remember myself with lawless lucidity, I have been my own accomplice, who knows too much, and therefore is dangerous. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The bowl that emerged was one of those gifts whose first impact produces in the recipient's mind a colored image, a blazoned blur, reflecting with such emblematic force the sweet nature of the donor that the tangible attributes of the thing are dissolved, as it were, in this pure inner blaze, but suddenly and forever leap into brilliant being when praised by an outsider to whom the true glory of the object is unknown. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Van tortured himself with thoughts of insufficient filial affection - a long story of unconcern, amused scorn, physical repulsion, and habitual dismissal. He looked around, making wild amends, willing her spirit to give him an unequivocal, and indeed all-deciding sign, of continued being behind the veil of time, beyond the flesh of space. But no response came, not a petal fell on his bench, not a gnat touched his hand. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The idea of God was invented in the small hours of history by a scam who had genius; it somehow reeks too much of humanity, that idea, to make its azure origin plausible ... ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I am quite willing to admit that they are also a deception but right now I believe in them so much that I infect them with truth. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I think it is all a matter of love ... ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The recollection also came back empty, and for the first time in all his life, perhaps, Luzhin asked himself the question – where exactly had it all gone, what had become of his childhood, whither had the veranda floated, whither, rustling through the bushes, had the familiar paths crept away? ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

One last word," I said in my horrible English, "are you quite, quite sure that
well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow , but
well
some day, any day, you will not come live with me? I will create a new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope."
"No," she said smiling, "no."
"It would have made all the difference," said Humbert Humbert. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The only consciousness that persists in the hereafter is the consciousness of pain. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Unattached details take all the sparkle out of your conversation. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

If only
it were possible to juicily belch up the life
one's lived, chew it anew and gulp it down,
and then once more to roll it with a fat,
ox-like tongue, to squeeze from its eternal
dregs the former sweetness of crisp grass,
drunk with the morning dew and the bitterness
of lilac leaves! ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's "control" not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the wa ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

[S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It happens that over a long period you are promised a great success, in which from the very start you do not believe, so dissimilar is it from the rest of fate's offering, and if from time to time you do think of it, then you do so as it were to indulge your fantasy - but when, at last, on a very ordinary day with a west wind blowing, the news comes - simply, instantaneously and decisevely destroying any hope in it - then you are suddenly amazed to find that although you did not believe in it, you had been living with it all this time, not realizingt he constant, close presence of the dream, which had long since grown fat and independent, so that now you cannot get it out of your life without making a hole in that life. ~ Vladimir Nabokov