Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

A little downy girl still wearing poppiesstill eating popcorn in the colored gloamwhere tawny Indians took paid croppersbecause you stole herfrom her wax-browed and dignified protectorspitting into hi...

For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is L. The suffix -ita has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita....

Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.

As far back as I can remember myself—and I remember myself with lawless lucidity, I have been my own accomplice, who knows too much, and therefore is dangerous.

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 f...

Bueno, algún día, si quieres venirte a vivir conmigo… Crearé un nuevo Dios y le agradeceré con gritos desgarradores si me das una esperanza microscópica.

Two silent time zones had now merged to form the standard time of one man's fate; and it is not impossible that the poet in New Wye and the thug in New York awoke that morning at the same crushed beat...

Coordinating thereEvents and objects with remote eventsAnd vanished objects. Making ornamentsOf accidents and possibilities.

The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale's white church tower when I looked around me for the last time.

Time means succession, and succession, change: Hence timelessness is bound to disarrange Schedules of sentiment.

I felt my life needed a shake-up.

After an early dinner at The Egg and We, a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure (...)

Might it console you to know that I expect nothing but torture from her return? That I regard you as a bird of paradise?She shook her head.- That my admiration for you is painfully strong?- I want Van...

You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.

The square root of I is I.

[On Du Bois] Celebrated Negro scholar and organizer. 70 years old, but looks 50. Dusky face, grizzled goatee, nice wrinkles, big ears — prodigiously like a White Russian General in mufti played sympat...

But one shelf was a little neater than the rest and here I noted the following sequence which for a moment seemed to form a vague musical phrase, oddly familiar: Hamlet, La morte d’Arthur, The Bridge...

But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets it rolling, doomed never again to stop?

I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory and a slippery...

I adore you. I shall never love any-body in my life as I adore you, never and nowhere, neither ineternity, nor in terrenity, neither in Ladore, nor on Terra, where they say our souls go. But! But, my...