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...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was you...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers,...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and ge...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

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.
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Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn s...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

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.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, f...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

The tiny madman in his padded cell.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event,...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. -...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

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 ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to en...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the read...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For m...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

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.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the h...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss som...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Caress the detail, the divine detail.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

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...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme met...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before bein...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in in...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of he...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the st...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

There was no Lo to behold.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Har...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. Sh...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, tr...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily ap...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

The distinct feature of everything extant is its monotony.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Words without experience are meaningless.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
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All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—En...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Lolita
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that liter...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their l...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exa...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

And the rest is rust and stardust.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Dear Jesus, do something.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imag...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the mos...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
My sin, my soul.
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the to...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Caress the detail, the divine detail
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Genius is an African who dreams up snow
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

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.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Solitude is the play field of Satan
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

[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

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, ban...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

You must be careful. There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, hap...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

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...
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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...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of partin...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

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...
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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.
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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.
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You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
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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...
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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.
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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
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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.
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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

I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

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Vladimir Nabokov

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Vladimir Nabokov

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