My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes) "we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed."
"... Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying here."
"There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita.


Vladimir Nabokov

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More Vladimir Nabokov

And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especiall...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly rec...
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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze o...
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was you...
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
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Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers,...
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I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes
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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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Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
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It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom.
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
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I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn s...
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It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
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The tiny madman in his padded cell.
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and ...
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. -...
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Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Solitude is the playfield of Satan. - Pale Fire, 1962.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to ...
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Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to en...
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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
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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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The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
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To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of...
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Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
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A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the read...
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For m...
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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
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Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the h...
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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, t...
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I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
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I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more ...
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I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with
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Dear Jesus, do something.
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Other men die; but I Am not another; therefore I'll not die
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the first - a dull man writing broken English, the second - ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
For me, a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic b...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
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[Against whom was it turned? Against whom did he conspire?] Tum-tee-tum. And once more - TUM! ... I ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in in...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
- A sentyment staje się uciążliwy. W końcu jest coś nazbyt fizycznego w próbie zachowania czą...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
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VLADIMIR NABOKOV
It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to ...
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She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer...
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To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
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VLADIMIR NABOKOV
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Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
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Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness....
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Good by-aye!" she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in k...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You have to be an artist and a madman...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. Sh...
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VLADIMIR NABOKOV
He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those...
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Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poiso...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Ink, a Drug.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything i...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the sa...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
But even in such works where the author is ideally unobtrusive, he remains diffused through the book...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A wave would arrive, all out of breath, but, as it had nothing to report, it would disperse in apolo...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to s...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I can only explain my behaviour then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a derang...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that liter...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You couldn't get more original than Laura. Laura. Yes, she was an original, all right. One of a kind...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The color of one's creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in ti...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anythin...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
but that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remain...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a si...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me - not by way of protest, not as a s...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sen...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bl...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very well do with a little rest in this subd...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
My little cup brims with tiddles.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal v...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed betwe...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lolita, luz de mi vida, fuego de mis entrañas. Pecado mío, alma mía. Lo-li-ta: la punta de la len...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon wh...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs throu...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable na...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze
I cannot get out, said the starling
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruin...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I would see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV