Vladimir nabokov quotes

There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.

The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.

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.

Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.

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

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

I confess, I do not believe in time.

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

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.

He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle.

Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.

Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

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

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.

Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

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

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.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

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 am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.

Let all of life be an unfettered howl.

Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.

in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

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

Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.

Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!

I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais!

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.

... my mind lay limp in an empty world.

The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.

Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?

To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces: the longing for privacy and the urge to go places: the introversion, interest directed within oneself toward one's own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values.

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

...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

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

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.

Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.

The future is but the obsolete in reverse.

As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

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.

I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.

There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.

Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.

And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.

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.

The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison.

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.

Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed—then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.

Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile.

All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.

I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.

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

In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.

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.

Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.

Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.

Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.

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

There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.

All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.

Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.

...for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.

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

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

The square root of I is I.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

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.

My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.

If he failed the first time he took his driver's licence test, it was mainly because he started an argument with the examiner in an ill-timed effort to prove that nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled. He was more circumspect the next time, and passed.

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love - from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter- to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behaviour of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time.

We are most artistically caged.

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

Genius is finding the invisible link between things.

Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.

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!

I don't think in any language. I think in images.

I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But, probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clapsed her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured: 'Oh, Hermann...." It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

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.

Dear Jesus, do something.

I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.

Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.

Words without experience are meaningless.

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

The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.

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

Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.

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

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.

The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition

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

Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

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

The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.

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

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.

Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.

Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.