Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
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Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
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Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
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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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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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All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
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I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
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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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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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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
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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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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
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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 was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane.
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Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.
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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 is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
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I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.
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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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I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.
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A good laugh is the best pesticide.
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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