The decrees of society are temporary ones; what Tolstoy is interested in are the eternal demands of morality.
Vladimir Nabokov
Related
No other photographer had such immediate and intimate access to Nabokov over so many years, ... Vlad...
BRIAN BOYD Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We all are wearing many hundred glasses of different colors. Therefore, everyone sees the world in d...
MUDITHA CHAMPIKA Take me to the height where success would seek my help to succeed!
I ARE If we all look at life we think how nice, then we look at death and everybody goes oh you can say th...
GARY F EVANS... Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be ... But i expect ...
THOMAS HARRIS I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made ...
RALPH WALDO EMERSON We all are wearing many hundred glasses of different colors. So, everyone see the world in different...
MUDITHA CHAMPIKA My little cup brims with tiddles.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV He said that academia reminded him of a badly run circus. The faculty members were like underfed ani...
SUSAN HUBBARD Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C. People are really interested in the concept of eternal youth in this plastic-surgery culture.
CHARLAINE HARRIS I don't know if I have a favorite color.
KATE MIDDLETON It's very special having a new little girl.
KATE MIDDLETON Rules of society are nothing; ones conscience is the umpire.
MADAME DUDEVANT Eternal values are much more everlasting than the temporary physical material things.
SUNDAY ADELAJA So, tomorrow, I'm leaving. And I'm not going to let that happen again with anyone else. I'm going to...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER Beauty is the light within. Only when you see the light within yourself will others see it in you.
F. JOHNSON The only deadly disease I have seen that is causing great harm and massacre latently yet the world h...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV ..."offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual"...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static bac...
J. G. BALLARD The words you can’t find, you borrow.
We read to know we’re not alone. We read because w...
GABRIELLE ZEVIN No need to feel shame for what you are.
DEYTH BANGER you know what the best kind of organic certification would be? make an unannounced visit to a farm a...
MICHAEL POLLAN Life begins somewhere and ends somewhere with time but to get somewhere with the life you have depen...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH A couple of customers interrupted [...] who wanted to know if we had some YA book about ants and ali...
SHAUN DAVID HUTCHINSON Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON Science is great for us. But for someone who sees the humans for more than one million years, scienc...
MUDITHA CHAMPIKA What love is it, then, that has no need of words to call us? In whose image are we made, to take suc...
CHRISTIAN BOBIN There is no greater glory than to die for love.
GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nasti...
GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. S...
GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ Technically, all tattoos are temporary, even permanent ones.
MOKOKOMA MOKHONOANA Everyone is the Umbrella Man and he is everyone. Every cough, sneeze, smile and wave means both ever...
CRAIG CLEVENGER Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.
GAIL SHEEHY Happy the society whose deepest divisions are ones of style.
PETER MCKAY A lot of people ask for sequels, but what they really want is just to know the characters are happy ...
KRISTAN HIGGINS Humor writing requires a rhythm and timing, as well as some kind of connection to the reader, and I ...
KRISTAN HIGGINS A tiny little baby!' says Tam. 'People look at me like I'm an animal. People who don't know me judge...
JON RONSON Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you wan...
DALE CARNEGIE We can leave a place behind, or we can stay in that place and leave our selfishness (often expressed...
JOHN H. GROBERG Never get to the point where you cannot see anything good about yourself
SOTONYE ANGA The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story.
YANN MARTEL Ideology... is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed and equipped to res...
LOUIS ALTHUSSER Love should be the encouragement of faith, not fear. Fear is temporary, love is eternal!
DR.LIRIDON DISHA If you are what you eat, you are what you see and hear.
E.A. BUCCHIANERI You are what you are, and what you are is not me!
ANTHONY T. HINCKS You often love someone not for what they are, but for what you are when you are with them.
JEFFREY FRY Good by-aye!" she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV One of them is knowing the difference between Morality and Wisdom. Morality is temporary, Wisdom is ...
HUNTER S. THOMPSON Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the...
EUGENE DEBS It's not who you are, but what you're made of. It's not where you come from, but where you're going ...
CAREW PAPRITZ Oi’m always noble, sir; it’s in my blood. ’As been ever since Oi ate that knight a few years b...
ELIZABETH HAYDON It was pivotal in making you but you don't remember it. Or do you? Do we understand the events that ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND We may not get to choose how we die, but we can chose how we live.
The universe may for...
SHAUN DAVID HUTCHINSON Dreams are hopeful because they exist as pure possibility. Unlike memories, which are fossils, long ...
SHAUN DAVID HUTCHINSON In life the only things that you see are things that you are projecting, and life presents you with ...
OSHO She said 'Over my dead body!' so I took her at her word.
DIANA WYNNE JONES The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being a...
NEIL GAIMAN What is the Other?" they ask.
The Other is the one who taught me whatI should be like, but not ...
PAULO COELHO Empathy is the ability to step outside of your own bubble and into the bubbles of other people. Empa...
C. JOYBELL C. A crime is born in the gap between the morality of society and that of the individual.
HåKAN NESSER It's all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you're properly trained.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Like all best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II My husband has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years, and I owe him a debt greater ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have to be seen to be believed.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughou...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief at Diana's loss, ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I myself prefer my New Zealand eggs for breakfast.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have behind me not only the splendid traditions and the annals of more than a thousand years but t...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II To what greater inspiration and counsel can we turn than to the imperishable truth to be found in th...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something e...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts an...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Grief is the price we pay for love.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The upward course of a nation's history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II At its heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical solutions. It is a nobl...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Chr...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II For many, Christmas is also a time for coming together. But for others, service will come first.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The lessons from the peace process are clear; whatever life throws at us, our individual responses w...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your s...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Therefore I am sure that this, my Coronation, is not the symbol of a power and a splendor that are g...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the man...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Madam President, speaking here in Dublin Castle it is impossible to ignore the weight of history, as...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II These wretched babies don't come until they are ready.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I know of no single formula for success. But over the years I have observed that some attributes of ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The events that I have attended to mark my Diamond Jubilee have been a humbling experience. It has t...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II No one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have been aware all the time that my peoples, spread far and wide throughout every continent and o...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The way of the world isn't the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and w...
N.K. JEMISIN No one should let yesterday use up too much of today. Easy to say, hard to live.
ANDREA HAIRSTON
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.
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VLADIMIR NABOKOV Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
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VLADIMIR NABOKOV Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
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VLADIMIR NABOKOV It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV 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...
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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,...
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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.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV 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...
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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.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV 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...
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...
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...
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