Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
-
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
-
I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.
-
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.
-
A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
-
I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
-
...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
-
The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.
-
while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
-
My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.
-
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
-
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
-
Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
-
do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
-
All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
-
A good laugh is the best pesticide.
-
I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
-
Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.
-
All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
-
Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!
-
Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being - not a constant state - that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden.
-
The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me - not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong site of the road.
-
Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
-
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.
-
Solitude is the playfield of Satan.