Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: honey-colored skin...

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'...

There is nothing louder than an American hotel; and, mind you, this was supposed to be a quiet, cozy, old-fashioned, homey place - 'gracious living' and all that stuff.

There was a rhythm, analternation in the dripping that I found as teasing as a cointrick.

There, tam, la-bas, the gaze of men glows with inimitable understanding; there the freaks that are tortured here walk unmolested; there time takes shape according to one’s pleasure, like a figured rug...

To the sound of this voice, to the music of the chessboard's evil lure, Luzhin recalled, with the exquisite, moist melancholy peculiar to recollections of love, a thousand games that he had played in...

Unfortunately his urge to write had suddenly petered out and he did not know what to do with himself. He was not sleepy having slept after dinner. The brandy only added to the nuisance. He was a big h...

Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment,...

V.V. sought to express something, which 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 c...

Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.

We all admire the spangled acrobat with classic grace meticulously walking his tight rope in the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sagging rope expert wearing scarecrow clothes and...

We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any de...

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

We loved - and it has all gone, somewhere...We loved - and now our love is frozen,and now it lies, one wing spread out, raisingits little feet - a dead sparrow on the dampgravel... But we loved... we...

When a hypothesis enters a scientist's mind, he checks it by calculation and experiment, that is, by the mimicry and the pantomime of truth. It's plausibility infects others, and the hypothesis is acc...

While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the acciden...

Without you I wouldn’t have moved this way, to speak the language of flowers.

You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy,... in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs,...the little deadly demon...; she stands unrecognized by them and unconsci...

You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy... in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs... the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecogn...

[...] należała jednak do tych kobiet, które łączą w sobie zdrową urodę z histeryczną łzawliwością, wybuchy liryczne z bardzo praktycznym, banalnym myśleniem, podły charakter z sentymentalizmem, ospałą...