Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
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Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
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Transcendental meditation is something that can be defined as a means to do what one wants to do in a better way, a right way, for maximum results.
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I love coming to India, and I find the people out here very warm and social as compared to people in the U.S.
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I love having the support of my caucus. We have a good working relationship.
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I just try to direct in a way that interests me. And, hopefully, other people will find it compelling.
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Faith is the inborn capacity to see God behind everything.
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Posterity will surely be amazed, and I hope vastly amused, that such slipshod and unconvincing theorizing should have so easily captivated twentieth-century minds and been so widely and recklessly applied.
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Climate change is severely impacting the health of our planet and all of its inhabitants, and we must transition to a clean energy economy that does not rely on fossil fuels.
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When I see something I like, that's all that counts. What they use, how they get there, I never bother them.
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Surround yourself with people whose definition of you is not based on your history, but your destiny.
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A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say at the age of eighteen.
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They’re evacuating the younger kids and everyone’s meeting in the Great Hall to get organized. We’re fighting.
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We came here with a plan: We're not going to let this game get by us.
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It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be.
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There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.
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Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day... and rightly so.
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It's like this," he'd explained once to Connie. "If someone gave you a single rose, you'd be happy, right?" "Okay," he went on, "Now imagine someone gives you ten thousand roses." "That is a whole lotta roses," she said. "That's too much." "Right. Too much. But more than that, it makes each individual rose much less special, right? It makes it hard to pick one out and say, 'That's the good one.' And it makes you want to just get rid of them all because none of them seem special now." Connie had narrowed her eyes. "Are you saying when you're at school you just want to get rid of everyone?
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In our society the most common traumas in women and children occur at the hands of their parents or intimate partners. Child abuse, molestation, and domestic violence all are inflicted by people who are supposed to love you. That knocks out the most important protection against being traumatized: being sheltered by the people you love. If the people whom you naturally turn to for care and protection terrify or reject you, you learn to shut down and to ignore what you feel.
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All great novels are great fairy tales.
