Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
-
All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
-
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.
-
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
-
Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.
-
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
-
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
-
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
-
I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
-
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.
-
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.
-
Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
-
A good laugh is the best pesticide.
-
I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
-
But in my arms she was always Lolita.
-
Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
-
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.
-
And the rest is rust and stardust.
-
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.
-
There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
-
...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.
-
The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.