Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.
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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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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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I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
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Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
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Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
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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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Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
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Dear Jesus, do something.
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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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We are most artistically caged.
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Her lips were like large crimson polyps.
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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
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Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.
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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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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.
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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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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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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I think it is all a matter of love.
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The square root of I is I.
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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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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.