Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.

I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.

I also know that the shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The s...

I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.

I do not want, John. You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.

I feel I understand Existence, or at least a minute part Of my existence, only through my art,

I had always thought that wringing one’s hands was a fictional gesture — the obscure outcome, perhaps, of some medieval ritual; but as I took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate meditat...

I loathe popular pulp, I loathe go-go gangs, I loathe jungle music, I loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories. I especially loathe vulgar movies—cripples raping nuns...

I love you, I’m waiting for you unbearably.

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

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

I was always lonely and I am lonely still.

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 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.

IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT SCENES ONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE FILMEDShakespeare in the part of the King's Ghost.The beheading of Louis the Sixteenth, the drums drowning his speech on the scaffold.Herm...

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look.

In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper.

In my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom, postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves.

In those years, that marvelous mess of constellations, nebulae, interstellar gaps and all the rest of the awesome show provoked in me an indescribable sense of nausea, of utter panic, as if I were han...