Vladimir Nabokov: Trending quotes (page 6)

“Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing… I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.”

“Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.”

“He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.”

“Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.”

“A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.”

“Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.”

“Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.”

“There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me.”

“My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.”

“I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze
I cannot get out, said the starling”

“Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.”

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

“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a child.”

“Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.”

“Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.”

“A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.”

“For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.”

“The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.”

“… in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.”