Vladimir Nabokov: Trending quotes

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Vladimir Nabokov: 386 quotes232 likes

“Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Speak, Memory

Source: Speak, Memory

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Source: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.”

Vladimir Nabokov book The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Source: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

“If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Source: Pale Fire

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Source: Pale Fire

“… memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Mary

Source: Mary

“I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.”

Vladimir Nabokov

“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Speak, Memory

Source: Speak, Memory

“The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Invitation to a Beheading

Source: Invitation to a Beheading

“a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Speak, Memory

Source: Speak, Memory

“I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Source: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Source: Pale Fire