Vladimir Nabokov: Quotes about love

Vladimir Nabokov was Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor. Explore interesting quotes on love.
Vladimir Nabokov: 386 quotes232 likes

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“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.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Source: Letters to Vera

“To begin with, let us take the following motto… Literature is Love. Now we can continue.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Despair

Source: Despair

“Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Variant: A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
Source: Lolita

“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.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“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.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Source: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“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

“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)

“After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct.”

Vladimir Nabokov

As quoted in &quot;Nabokov&#x27;s Love Affairs&quot; by R. W. Flint http://www.powells.com/review/2003_07_17.html in The New Republic (17 June 1957). <br class="br">On a Book Entitled Lolita (1956)