Vladimir Nabokov Quotes page 3

“I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.”

Source: Lolita

“Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.”

Source: Lolita

“Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me.”

Source: Lolita

“the evolution of sense, in a sense, is the evolution of non sense”

Lolita

“I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.”

“I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.”

“Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.”

Source: Pale Fire

“Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.”

Source: Pale Fire

“I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.”

Source: Lolita

“The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.”

Source: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Vladimir Nabokov book Invitation to a Beheading

Source: Invitation to a Beheading

“I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.”

“I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.”

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.”

“If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”

Source: Pale Fire

“His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.”

Source: Pale Fire

“There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.”

Vladimir Nabokov book The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Source: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

“for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.”

“My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.”

Source: Pale Fire

“While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.”

Source: Lolita

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”

Source: Lolita

“The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.”

Source: Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov book Speak, Memory

Source: Speak, Memory

“Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care.”

“Years of secret suffering had taught me superhuman self-control.”

Source: Lolita

“Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.”

Source: Lolita

“Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.”

Source: Lolita

“beware of ideas…”

“I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.”

“Life is a message scribbled in the dark.”

Source: Lolita

“Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle.”

“The character I have in view when I say "smug vulgarian" is, thus, not the part-time philistine, but the total type, the genteel bourgeois, the complete universal product of triteness and mediocrity. He is the conformist, the man who conforms to his group, and he also is typified by something else: he is a pseudo-idealist, he is pseudo-compassionate, he is pseudo-wise. The fraud is the closest ally of the true philistine. All such great words as "Beauty," "Love," "Nature," "Truth," and so on become masks and dupes when the smug vulgarian employs them. … The philistine likes to impress and he likes to be impressed, in consequence of which a world of deception, of mutual cheating, is formed by him and around him.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lectures on Russian Literature

Lectures on Russian Literature (1982)

“Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.”

“The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.”

As quoted in What Is the Sangha?: The Nature of Spritual Community (2001) by Sangharakshita, p. 136.

Vladimir Nabokov book Lectures on Russian Literature

Lectures on Russian Literature (1982)

“Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss
Poems that take a thousand years to die
But ape the immortality of this
Red label on a little butterfly.”