EN RU
Show more

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