Vladimir Nabokov Quotes: 27

• It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

  Lolita

• And the rest is rust and stardust.

  Lolita

• Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.

• I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes

• To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

• Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece

  Lolita

• Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.

  Lolita

• The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible

• A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

• Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf"came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf"and there was no wolf behind him.

  Lectures on Literature

• Let all of life be an unfettered howl.

• I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.

• 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.

  Lolita

• Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

  Mary

• Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

• Ink, a Drug.

  Bend Sinister

• The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

• I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

• Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.

• The square root of I is I.

  Bend Sinister

• All religions are based on obsolete terminology.

  Pale Fire

• Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

• while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

• Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

• Light in comparison with darkness is a void.

• We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.

  Bend Sinister

• 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?

  Glory