Vladimir Nabokov: Wording

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

“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible”

Vladimir Nabokov

“Words without experience are meaningless.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“Oh, "impressed" is not the right word! Treading the soil of the moon gives one, I imagine (or rather my projected self imagines), the most remarkable romantic thrill ever experienced in the history of discovery.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Strong Opinions

On the first moon landing, p. 150.
Strong Opinions (1973)
Context: Oh, "impressed" is not the right word! Treading the soil of the moon gives one, I imagine (or rather my projected self imagines), the most remarkable romantic thrill ever experienced in the history of discovery. Of course, I rented a television set to watch every moment of their marvelous adventure. That gentle little minuet that despite their awkward suits the two men danced with such grace to the tune of lunar gravity was a lovely sight. It was also a moment when a flag means to one more than a flag usually does. I am puzzled and pained by the fact that the English weeklies ignored the absolutely overwhelming excitement of the adventure, the strange sensual exhilaration of palpating those precious pebbles, of seeing our marbled globe in the black sky, of feeling along one's spine the shiver and wonder of it. After all, Englishmen should understand that thrill, they who have been the greatest, the purest explorers. Why then drag in such irrelevant matters as wasted dollars and power politics?

“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“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

“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.

“How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!”

Vladimir Nabokov book Speak, Memory

Source: Speak, Memory

“…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.”

Vladimir Nabokov

“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

“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Speak, Memory

Source: Speak, Memory

“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)

“Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Lolita (1955)

“Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lectures on Russian Literature

Lectures on Russian Literature (1982)