Nabokov Vladimir Quotes & Sayings

this summer is so much sadder than the other — Vladimir Nabokov

From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment. — Vladimir Nabokov

She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds. — Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer. — Vladimir Nabokov

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

Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English. — Vladimir Nabokov

I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around. — Vladimir Nabokov

I would see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, to a glittering summit where laughing athletes stripped to the waist were waiting for her, for her. — Vladimir Nabokov

Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones. — Vladimir Nabokov

And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy — Vladimir Nabokov

We are most artistically caged. — Vladimir Nabokov

I am quite willing to admit that they are also a deception but right now I believe in them so much that I infect them with truth. — Vladimir Nabokov

No Leslie, I'm not dead. I have finished building a world, and this is my Sabbath rest. — Vladimir Nabokov

And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an american businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead. — Vladimir Nabokov

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. — Vladimir Nabokov

His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss. — Vladimir Nabokov

There was a rhythm, an
alternation in the dripping that I found as teasing as a coin
trick. — Vladimir Nabokov

I will never go back. For the simple reason that all the Russia I need, after all, is with me
always with me. Her literature, her language, my own Russian childhood. I will never return, I will never surrender. — Vladimir Nabokov

By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane. — Vladimir Nabokov

...17nastai hugshin emegtei... — Vladimir Nabokov

I am an actor, living generally on air, but I have always elastic hopes for the future; they may be stretched indefinitely, such hopes, without bursting — Vladimir Nabokov

I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for nothing. — Vladimir Nabokov

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge. — Vladimir Nabokov

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

My mind lay limp in an empty world. — Vladimir Nabokov

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir! — Amity Gaige

When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence. — Vladimir Nabokov

The priest rose to take up the crucifix; at that, she strained her neck forward like someone who is thirsty, and, pressing her lips to the body of the Man-God, she laid upon it with all her expiring strength the most passionate kiss of love she had ever given. Then he recited the Miserateur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began he unctions: first on the eyes, which had so coveted all earthly splendors; then on the nostrils, greedy for mild breezes and the smells of love; then on the mouth, which had opened to utter lies, which had moaned with pride and cried out in lust; then on the hands, which had delighted in the touch of smooth material; and lastly on the soles of the feet, once so quick when she hastened to satiate her desires and which now would never walk again. — Vladimir Nabokov

...My taut heart
lurches heavily, like a sack in a cart, clattering
downhill, towards a cliff, towards an abyss!
It can't be stopped! — Vladimir Nabokov

On such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen mud and horror in my heart. — Vladimir Nabokov

The two lads were told to wash their hands. The recent thrill of adventure had been superseded by another sort of excitement. They locked themselves up. The tap ran unheeded. Both were in a manly state and moaning like doves. — Vladimir Nabokov

For life has worn me down: continual uneasiness, concealment of my knowledge, pretense, fear, a painful straining of all my nerves - not to let down, not to ring out ... and even to this day I still feel an ache in that part of my memory where the very beginning of this effort is recorded, that is, the occasion when I first understood that things which to me had seemed natural were actually forbidden, impossible, that any thought of them was criminal. — Vladimir Nabokov

... 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

Beaming and melting in smiles of benevolence and self-effacement, they sidled up and plumped down next to Lucette, who turned to them with her last, last, last free gift of staunch courtesy that was stronger than failure and death. — Vladimir Nabokov

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. — Vladimir Nabokov

[S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination. — Vladimir Nabokov

I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me. — Vladimir Nabokov

Here lies the sense of literary creation to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times ... To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern ... — Vladimir Nabokov

I really knew nothing about her, blinded as I was by that burning loveliness which replaces everything else and justifies everything — Vladimir Nabokov

He began with the day's copy of The New York Times. His lips moving like wrestling worms, he read about all kinds of things. Hrushchov — Vladimir Nabokov

Forget me now, but remember me afterwards, when the bitter part is forgotten. This — Vladimir Nabokov

And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine. — Vladimir Nabokov

We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night - every night, every night - the moment I feigned sleep. — Vladimir Nabokov

Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl. — Vladimir Nabokov

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. — Vladimir Nabokov

And the most poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the chorus. — Vladimir Nabokov

I now felt a new, pitiful tenderness toward the poem as one has for a fickle young creature who has been stolen and brutally enjoyed by a black giant but now again is safe in our hall and park, whistling with the stableboys, swimming with the tame seal. The — Vladimir Nabokov

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. - VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Speak, Memory: A Memoir — Sheldon Solomon

'Pnin' by Vladimir Nabokov, which is a literally small book, fit right in my common law book. I would sit in class and read it. — Elizabeth Strout

Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with! — Vladimir Nabokov

Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional. — Vladimir Nabokov

Great novels are above all great fairy tales ... literature does not tell the truth but makes it up. — Vladimir Nabokov

But in my arms she was always Lolita. — Vladimir Nabokov

All three of them stood for a moment gazing at the stars.
'And all these are worlds,' said Hagen.
'Or else,' said Clements with a yawn, 'a frightful mess. I suspect it is really a fluorescent corpse, and we are inside it. — Vladimir Nabokov

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

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form. — Vladimir Nabokov

...there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it... — Vladimir Nabokov

It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to do me a refined aesthetic favor, had touched my sleeve and said, "I want you to meet-" and led me to Nina, who sat in the corner of a couch, her body folded Z-wise, with an ashtray at her heel, and she took a long turquoise cigarette holder from her lips and joyfully, slowly exclaimed, "Well, of all people-" and then all evening my heart felt like breaking, as I passed from group to group with a sticky glass in my fist, now and then looking at her from a distance (she did not look ... ), and listening to scraps of conversation, and overheard one man saying to another, "Funny, how they all smell alike, burnt leaf through whatever perfume they use, those angular dark-haired girls," and as it often happens, a trivial remark related to some unknown topic coiled and clung to one's own intimate recollection, a parasite of its sadness. — Vladimir Nabokov

Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names. — Vladimir Nabokov

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

Certainly it's all in bloom, certainly we'll go. For aren't you and I gods? ... I sense in my blood the rotation of unexplorable universes ...
Listen - I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. 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. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life. — Vladimir Nabokov

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. — Vladimir Nabokov

A moment later I heard my sweetheart running up the stairs. My heart expanded with such force that it almost blotted me out. I hitched up the pants of my pajamas, flung the door open: and simultaneously Lolita arrived, in her Sunday frock, stamping, panting, and the she was in my arms, her innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws, my palpitating darling! — Vladimir Nabokov

'I shall vomit,' said Hugh, 'if you persist in pestering me with all that odious rot.' — Vladimir Nabokov

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. — Vladimir Nabokov

My patient was one of those singular and unfortunate people who regard their heart ("a hollow, muscular organ," according to the gruesome definition in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, which Pnin's orphaned bag contained) with a queasy dread, a nervous repulsion, a sick hate, as if it were some strong slimy untouchable monster that one had to be parasitized with, alas. — Vladimir Nabokov

Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being
not a constant state
that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden. — Vladimir Nabokov

How can I demonstrate [ ... ] that I have glimpsed somebody's future recollection? — Vladimir Nabokov

Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. — Vladimir Nabokov

Solitude was corrupting me. — Vladimir Nabokov

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. — Vladimir Nabokov

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. — Vladimir Nabokov

You see, we find comfort in telling ourselves that the world could not exist without us, that it exists only inasmuch as we ourselves exist, inasmuch as we can represent it to ourselves. Death, infinite space, galaxies, all this is frightening, exactly because it transcends the limits of our perception. — Vladimir Nabokov

I do not begin my novel at the beginning, I do not reach chapter three before I reach chapter four, I do not go dutifully from one page to the next, in consecutive order; no, I pick out a bit here and a bit there, till I have filled all the gaps on paper. This is why I like writing my stories and novels on index cards, numbering them later when the whole set is complete. Every card is rewritten many times. — Vladimir Nabokov

But that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since."
"this then is my story. i have reread it. it has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. at this or that twist of it i feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than i care to probe. — Vladimir Nabokov

I had once been splintered into a million beings and objects. Today I am one, tomorrow I shall splinter again. And thus everything in the world decants and modulates. That day I was on the crest of a wave. I knew that all my surroundings were notes of one and the same harmony, knew - secretly - the source and the inevitable resolution of the sounds assembled for an instant, and the new chord that would be engendered by each of the dispersing notes. My soul's musical ear knew and comprehended everything. — Vladimir Nabokov

We all have such fateful objects
it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another
carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break. — Vladimir Nabokov

[ ... ] leaving for a day or two that hopeless sense of loss which makes beauty what it is: a distant lone tree against golden heavens; ripples of light on the inner curve of a bridge; a thing impossible to capture. — Vladimir Nabokov

beware of ideas... — Vladimir Nabokov

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. — Vladimir Nabokov

Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as None has cried out. Now I shall try what none Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done. — Vladimir Nabokov

A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young. I remember how once, between terms, not at Cornell, a student brought a transistor set with him into the reading room. He managed to state that one, he was playing "classical" music; that two, he was doing it "softly"; and that three, "there were not many readers around in summer." I was there, a one-man multitude. — Vladimir Nabokov

The crickets kept crepitating; from time to time there came a sweet whiff of burning juniper; and above the black alpestrine steppe, above the silken sea, the enormous, all-engulfing sky, dove-gray with stars, made one's head spin, and suddenly Martin again experienced a feeling he had known on more than one occasion as a child: an unbearable intensification of all his senses, a magical and demanding impulse, the presence of something for which alone it was worth living. — Vladimir Nabokov

The future is but the obsolete in reverse. — Vladimir Nabokov

I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past. — Vladimir Nabokov

For she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum. — Vladimir Nabokov

She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions. — Vladimir Nabokov

And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all. — Vladimir Nabokov

Thus the story describes a full circle ... a vicious circle as all circles are, despite their posing as apples, or planets, or human faces. — Vladimir Nabokov

Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the centre vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief - the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say 'patter' intentionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one. — Vladimir Nabokov

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet
Age: five thousand three hundred days. — Vladimir Nabokov

He enjoyed dancing with a fair stranger, enjoyed the vacuous, chaste talk, through which you listen closely to that bewitching, vague something going on inside you and inside her, which will last a couple of bars more and then, finding no resolution, will vanish forever and be utterly forgotten. But while the bond of bodies is still unbroken, the outlines of a potential love affair begin to form, and the rough draft already comprises everything: the sudden silence between two people in some dimly lit room; the man carefully placing with trembling fingers on the edge of an ashtray the just-lit bit impedient cigarette; the woman's eyes slowly closing in as in a film scene.. — Vladimir Nabokov

...beyond observing that some law of logic should fix the number of coincidences, in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living organism of a new truth ("Tell me," says Osberg's little glitana to the Moors, El Motela and Ramera, "what is the precise minimum of hairs on a body that allows one to call it 'hairy'?") — Vladimir Nabokov

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. — Vladimir Nabokov

In a livid wet dress, under the tumbling mist ... had run ecstatically up that ridge above Moulinet to be felled there by a thunderbolt. — Vladimir Nabokov

Light in comparison with darkness is a void. — Vladimir Nabokov

The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov once said: In a Democracy, portraits of a nation's leader should never exceed the size of a postage stamp. That won't happen so quickly in Russia. — Vladimir Sorokin

In the fatal course of the most painful ailments, sometimes [ ... ], sometimes there occur sweet mornings of perfect repose- and that not owning to some blessed pill or potion [ ... ] or at least without our knowing that the loving hand of despair slipped us the drug. — Vladimir Nabokov

I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder - I believe she stole it from her mother's Spanish maid - a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing - and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the
house her mother's voice calling her, with a rising frantic note - and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since - until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another. — Vladimir Nabokov

And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower. — Vladimir Nabokov