Nabokov Quotes

“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, Lolita

“A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“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.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Genius is finding the invisible link between things.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“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, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“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

“while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space,
the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“I fear no hell, just as I expect no heaven. Nabokov summed up a nonbeliever’s view of the cosmos, and our place in it, thus: “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.” The 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle put it slightly differently: “One life. A little gleam of Time between two Eternities.” Though I have many memories to cherish, I value the present, my time on earth, those around me now. I miss those who have departed, and recognize, painful as it is, that I will never be reunited with them. There is the here and now – no more. But certainly no less. Being an adult means, as Orwell put it, having the “power of facing unpleasant facts.” True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we’re lucky) to make the most of on this earth.

There is also something intrinsically courageous about being an atheist. Atheists confront death without mythology or sugarcoating. That takes courage.”
― Jeffrey Tayler

“I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“She was an extravagantly slender girl. Her ribs showed. The conspicuous knobs of her hipbones framed a hollowed abdomen, so flat as to belie the notion of "belly." Her exquisite bone structure immediately slipped into a novel - became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura

“The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

“The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“what stars, what thought and sadness up above, and what ignorance below.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

“Он спрашивает: "Вы анархист?" -- "Я отвечаю, -- здесь Пнин прерывает свой рассказ, чтобы предаться уютному беззвучному веселью. -- Первое, что мы понимаем под "анархизмом"? Анархизм практический, метафизический, теоретический, абстрактический, индивидуальный, социальный, мистикальный? Когда я был молод, -- так я говорю, -- это все для меня имело важнейшн значейшн. Таким образом, мы имели интереснейшн дискушн, вследствие которой я проводил две цельные недели на Эллис-Айленд", -- брюшко рассказчика начинает сотрясаться; оно сотрясается; рассказчик корчится от смеха.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

“Line 130: I never bounced a ball or swung a bat

Frankly I too never excelled in soccer and cricket; I am a passable horseman, a vigorous though unorthodox skier, a good skater, a tricky wrestler, and an enthusiastic mountain climber.”
― Vladmir Nabokov

“there is the rare kind of time in which I live - the pause, the hiatus, when the heart is like a feather....”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

“I know something. I know something. But expression of it comes so hard !”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

“I have no desires, save the desire to express myself- in defiance of all the world's muteness.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

“Uvijek se možete pouzdati u ubojicu da će pisati kitnjastim stilom.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Alone, unknown, unloved, I die...and the room had grown a ghostly thorax, with a heart unknown, unloved - but not alone”
― Vladimir Nabokov, [Collected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)] [By: Nabokov, V.] [August, 2013]

“Next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought and speech can offer. Living as you do in freedom, in that spiritual open where you were born and bred, you may be apt to regard stories of prison life coming from remote lands as exaggerated accounts spread by panting fugitives. That a country exists where for almost a quarter of a century literature has been limited to illustrating the advertisements of a firm of slave-traders is hardly credible to people for whom writing and reading books is synonymous with having and voicing individual opinions. But if you do not believe in the existence of such conditions, you may at least imagine them, and once you have imagined them you will realize with new purity and pride the value of real books written by free men for free men to read.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“to play a solitary game of chequers,
to read, to write – what should I do?”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“The weather is frosty: straight pink smoke puffs and the air tastes of sugar-glazed cranberries.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Vera

“Se oggi voglio scrivere di Nabokov, è per celebrare la nostra lettura di Nabokov a Teheran, contro tutto e contro tutti. Dei suoi romanzi scelgo quello che ho insegnato per ultimo, e che è legato a così tanti ricordi. È di Lolita che voglio scrivere, ma ormai mi riesce impossibile farlo senza raccontare anche di Teheran. Questa, dunque, è la storia di Lolita a Teheran, di come Lolita abbia dato un diverso colore alla città, e di come Teheran ci abbia aiutate a ridefinire il romanzo di Nabokov e a trasformarlo in un altro Lolita: il nostro.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Pnin is constantly being misled by subjective interpretations of objective reality but it doesn’t really matter, it doesn’t do him any real harm.”
― Violet Wells