Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
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A good laugh is the best pesticide.
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It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
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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.
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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
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Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
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Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.
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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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Of all my Russian books, the defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract Chess is supposed to be
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I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
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...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.
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Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.
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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.
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Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.
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And the rest is rust and stardust.
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Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
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It is certainly not then-not in dreams- but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.
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And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.
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There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.