One is always at home in one's past...
Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.
Of students’ papers: ‘I am generally very benevolent [said Shade]. But there are certain trifles I do not forgive.’ Kinbote: ‘For instance?’ ‘Not having read the required book. Having read it like an...
O my Carmen, my Carmen! Something, something those something nights And the stars, and the cars, and the bars and the barmen ~
No, I have as yet said nothing, or, rather, said only bookish words... and in the end the logical thing would be for me to give up and I would give up if I were labouring for a reader existing today,...
No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of ju...
No free man needs a God; but was I free?How fully I felt nature glued to meAnd how my childish palate loved the tasteHalf-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!My picture book was at an early ageThe...
My God died young. Theolatry i foundDegrading, and its premises, unsound.No free man needs God; but was I free?
Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht,...
Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a s...
Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics...
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love you – and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created – out of fi...
It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues.
If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look.
Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
I'm thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art, And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita.
I was the shadow of the waxwing slainBy the false azure in the windowpane;I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and ILived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.And from the inside, too, I'd duplicateMyself, m...
I think bourgeois fathers – wing-collar workers in pencil-striped pants, dignified, office-tied fathers, so different from young American veterans of today or from a happy, jobless Russian-born expatr...
I suppose the pain of parting will be red and loud.