Nabokov Ada Quotes & Sayings

I don't think that everyone should have a philosophical answer to any given question. There are things that need to be done. — Aleksandar Hemon

I am blown away that my God, who could do this all by Himself, would choose to let me be a little part of it. — Katie J. Davis

And now, said Ada, Van is going to stop being vulgar - I
mean, stop forever! Because I had and have and shall always
have only one beau, only one beast, only one sorrow, only one joy. — Vladimir Nabokov

I have always had a number of parts lined up in case the muse failed. A lepidopterist exploring famous jungles came first, then there was the chess grand master, then the tennis ace with an unreturnable service, then the goalie saving a historic shot, and finally, finally, the author of a pile of unknown writings- Pale Fire, Lolita, Ada- which my heirs discover and publish. — Vladimir Nabokov

Listening can make the difference between a mediocre organization and a great one. — Lee Iacocca

Ada girl, adored girl, [ ... ] I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended. — Vladimir Nabokov

You can get the oldest drum machine out and whack out four sounds like a kick, snare, and two types of high-hat, and try and come up with the freshest thing on the spot. The gear can guide you - you can choose one bit of gear and it's obviously got its restrictions and its limitations, but at the same time, you've got to exploit what it's capable of and what it's best used for. — Rob Brown

Making klv zdB AoyvBno wkh gwzxm dqg kzwAAqvo a gwttp vq wjfhm Ada in natural bower of aspens xliC mujzikml. — Vladimir Nabokov

Death is dreadfully personal, terribly important to oneself, and so unimportant to the rest of the world. — Kate Langley Bosher

Mindless, beautiful, and deadly... — P.C. Cast

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. — Vladimir Nabokov

Their first free and frantic caresses had been preceded by a brief period of strange craftiness, of cringing stealth. — Vladimir Nabokov

There is nothing so banal in the world,' said Ada 'than pitching stones at a hawfinch. — Vladimir Nabokov

V.V. sought to express something, which until expressed had only a twilight being (or even none at all
nothing but the illusion of the backward shadow of its imminent expression). It was Ada's castle of cards. It was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick's difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterful or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time. — Vladimir Nabokov

The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism. — Paul Ryan

It's exactly my sense of existing - a fragment, a wisp of color. — Vladimir Nabokov

But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years - problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space - and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die. — Vladimir Nabokov

I've written something and I would like to have my first film directed by the time I'm 30. — Ryan Phillippe