Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (193 quotes, page 2)

Vladimir Nabokov: 193 quotes232 likes

Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

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

Source: Lolita

“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…”

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Strong Opinions

"Foreword", p. 3.
Source: Strong Opinions (1973)

“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.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)
Context: 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. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

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

Vladimir Nabokov

“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.”

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“Ink, a Drug.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Bend Sinister

Source: Bend Sinister

“We are most artistically caged.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Source: Pale Fire

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Speak, Memory

Source: Speak, Memory

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“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!”

Vladimir Nabokov book The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

Source: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“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.”

Vladimir Nabokov

“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.”

Vladimir Nabokov

“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.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Laughter in the Dark

Source: Laughter in the Dark

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Lectures on Literature

Source: Lectures on Literature

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Strong Opinions

"Foreword", p. 3.
Strong Opinions (1973)

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Variant: Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
Source: Lolita

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.”

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

Source: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

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

Vladimir Nabokov

“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.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

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

Vladimir Nabokov

“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.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pnin

Source: Pnin

“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.”

Vladimir Nabokov book The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Source: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

“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.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Speak, Memory

Source: Speak, Memory

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Source: Pale Fire (1962)

“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.

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

Vladimir Nabokov

“The square root of I is I.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Bend Sinister

Source: Bend Sinister

“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

“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

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