Vladimir Nabokov: Trending quotes (page 7)

“Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!”

“Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.”

“Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.”

“One is always at home in one's past…”

“We are most artistically caged.”

“Ink, a Drug.”

“She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.”

“Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.”

“Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”

“You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.”

“I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.”

“A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle…”

“if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.”

“You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”

“Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.”

“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.”

“All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs.”