Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
-
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.
-
...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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
-
And the rest is rust and stardust.
-
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
-
There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
-
Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
-
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane.
-
It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
-
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.
-
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
-
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.
-
I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
-
A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world.
-
It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.
-
Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.
-
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
-
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
-
I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.
-
I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
-
I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth.
-
But in my arms she was always Lolita.