Authors — Quotes

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