Vladimir Nabokov: Trending quotes (page 9)

“We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.”

“I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.”

“Words without experience are meaningless.”

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.”

“Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.”

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”

“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.”

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”

“All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.”

“We can at last describe his tie, an Easter gift from a dressy butcher, his brother in law in Onhava: imitation silk, colour chocolate brown barred with red, the end tucked into the shirt between the second and third buttons - a Zemblan fashion of the nineteen thirties.”

“The lost glove is happy.”

“My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes) "we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed."
"… Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying here."
"There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita.”

“But in my arms she was always Lolita.”

“Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.”

“A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and
Infinite aftertime: above your head
They close like giant wings, and you are dead.”

“The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
and robs it. The moon is a thief:
he steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.”

“I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”