Vladimir Nabokov: Trending quotes (page 3)

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.”

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

“His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”