Vladmir Nabokov Quotes

You talk like a book. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Glancing sideways, he said that he loved her. Then, turning rapidly, he walked away and entered a tobacco shop. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

And finally there was the sleepless night
when i decided to explore and fight
the foul, the inadmissible abyss,
devoting all my twisted life to this
one task. today i'm sixty-one. waxwings
are berry-pecking. a cicada sings. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

She had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

V.V. sought to express something, which until expressed had only a twilight being (or even none at all
nothing but the illusion of the backward shadow of its imminent expression). It was Ada's castle of cards. It was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick's difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterful or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Fame in our day is too common to be confused with the enduring glow around the deserving book. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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

Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Making klv zdB AoyvBno wkh gwzxm dqg kzwAAqvo a gwttp vq wjfhm Ada in natural bower of aspens xliC mujzikml. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The satisfaction of a special Pninian craving. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone save her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for nothing. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasi-things; prose is for explanation and exposition, it is essentially didactic, documentary, informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it is only faute de mieux written in words. The influential modern stylist is Hemingway. It would be almost inconceivable now to write like Landor. Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right. ~ Iris Murdoch

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

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

There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbour, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline ... it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship's funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture – Find What the Sailor Has Hidden – that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen." A brilliant, and moving, mixture of perception and reality. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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

I qualify it as pathetic. Pathetic
because despite the insatiable fire of my venereal appetite, I intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old child. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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

[ ... ] and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Nymphets do not occur in polar regions. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

For better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

From my point of view, any outstanding work of art is a fantasy insofar as it reflects the unique world of a unique individual. Art is not just simple arithmetic, it's a delicate calculus. Keep in mind the passion of the scientist and the precision of the artist. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Sometimes, though, angels smoke-in their sleeves. But when the archangel goes by, they throw their cigarettes away: This is what falling stars are. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself ... never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because ... the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind ... but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Both were diverted by life's young fumblings,
both saddened by the wisdom of time ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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. - VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Speak, Memory: A Memoir ~ Sheldon Solomon

The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov once said: In a Democracy, portraits of a nation's leader should never exceed the size of a postage stamp. That won't happen so quickly in Russia. ~ Vladimir Sorokin

What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole with greater or lesser distinction (like the swell and fall of uneven breathing), now rolling up this image, now that, letting it ride in the wind, or even tossing it out on the shore, where it seems to move and live for a minute on its own and presently is drawn back again by grey seas where it sinks or is strangely transfigured. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Go on from here, Ada, please. (She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer's article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I'm all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact - that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperator-skaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Religion is boring and alien to me and relates no more than a chimera to what is to me the reality of the spirit. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

And the most poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the chorus. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Time is but memory in the making. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Life with you was lovely - and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink 'v' in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering 'l.' Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too. ~ 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

...My taut heart
lurches heavily, like a sack in a cart, clattering
downhill, towards a cliff, towards an abyss!
It can't be stopped! ~ Vladimir Nabokov

And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It is quite natural, then, that the solidly unionized professional paraphrast experiences a surge of dull hatred and fear, and in some cases real panic, when confronted with the possibility that a shift in fashion, or the influence of an adventurous publishing house, may suddenly remove from his head the cryptic rosebush he carries or the maculated shield erected between him and the specter of inexorable knowledge. As a result the canned music of rhymed versions is enthusiastically advertised, and accepted, and the sacrifice of textual precision applauded as something rather heroic, whereas only suspicion and bloodhounds await the gaunt, graceless literalist groping around in despair for the obscure word that would satisfy impassioned fidelity and accumulating in the process a wealth of information which only makes the advocates of pretty camouflage tremble or sneer. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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

"offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual" ... ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't. ~ Vladimir Nabokov