Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
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One is always at home in one's past.
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All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.
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Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
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The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual;" and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.
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My little cup brims with tiddles.
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Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
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I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
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While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.
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Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile.
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a man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one’s watch, since together with the man, the whole world is destroyed; the last letter is instantly reduced to dust and, with it, all the postmen; and like smoke, vanishes the estate bequeathed to a nonexistent progeny.
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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God; but was I free?
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Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as nymphets.
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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
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As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me.
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A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
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A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.
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Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
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Caress the detail, the divine detail.
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.