Vladimir Nabokov: Trending quotes

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Vladimir Nabokov: 386 quotes232 likes

“… for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Source: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“My God died young. Theolatry i found
Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs God; but was I free?”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Source: Pale Fire

“There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!”

Vladimir Nabokov book Speak, Memory

Source: Speak, Memory

“We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“Look at this tangle of thorns.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being.”

Vladimir Nabokov

“All religions are based on obsolete terminology.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Source: Pale Fire

“do what only a true artist can do… pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Source: Pale Fire

“I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Source: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love you – and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created – out of five vowels and three consonants.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Source: Letters to Vera

“Genius is finding the invisible link between things.”

Vladimir Nabokov

“There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pnin

Source: Pnin

“Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Interview with Herbert Gold, The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, 4th series (1977), p. 107 ISBN 0-140-04543-0

“The square root of I is I.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Bend Sinister

Source: Bend Sinister

“I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Strong Opinions

Source: Strong Opinions (1973), p. 45
Context: To be quite candid — and what I am going to say now is something I have never said before, and I hope that it provokes a salutary chill — I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.