Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

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“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…”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Ink, a Drug.”

“We are most artistically caged.”

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

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

“Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.”

“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!”

“…(hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
by the false azure in the windowpane;”

“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.”

“I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.”

“The square root of I is I.”

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

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

“Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?”

“There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.”

“Genius is finding the invisible link between things.”

“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.”

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

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

“All religions are based on obsolete terminology.”

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

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

“Look at this tangle of thorns.”

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