Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
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Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
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We are most artistically caged.
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And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.
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The square root of I is I.
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle.
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I don't think in any language. I think in images.
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You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.
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Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
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To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces: the longing for privacy and the urge to go places: the introversion, interest directed within oneself toward one's own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values.
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Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
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Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.
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If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name.
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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
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I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
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Her lips were like large crimson polyps.
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I think it is all a matter of love.
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Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.
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I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle.
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Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.