Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years - problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space - and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die.
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Stirless, I stand at the window, and in the black bowl of the sky glows like a golden drop of honey the mellow moon
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There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
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Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.
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I have no ear for music. When I attend a concert, I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians.
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You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.
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Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
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We are most artistically caged.
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My own ultraviolet darling. " Lolita
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My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
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…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.
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Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.
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And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
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Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
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The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.
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The square root of I is I.
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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
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Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities.
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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
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Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.
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I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for nothing.
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You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.