Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open

that swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born...

Solitude was corrupting me.

and finally there was the sleepless night when i decided to explore and fight the foul, the inadmissible abyss, devoting all my twisted life to this one task. today i'm sixty-one. waxwings are berry-pecking. a cicada sings.

Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer.

I think she always nursed a small mad hope.

When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor.

Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.

All the information I have about myself is from forged documents.

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

All three of them stood for a moment gazing at the stars. ''And all these are worlds,'' said Hagen. ''Or else,'' said Clements with a yawn, ''a frightful mess. I suspect it is really a fluorescent corpse, and we are inside it.

Death often is the point of life's joke.

I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with

Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.

It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, in moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

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

The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.

One opal cloudlet in an oval form reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm which in a distant valley has been staged for we are most artistically caged.

We sat and drank, each with a separate past locked up in him, and fate's alarm clocks set at unrelated futures -- when, at last, a wrist was cocked, and eyes of consorts met.

leaving for a day or two that hopeless sense of loss which makes beauty what it is: a distant lone tree against golden heavens; ripples of light on the inner curve of a bridge; a thing impossible to capture.

One last word, I said in my horrible English, are you quite, quite sure that--well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow , but--well--some day, any day, you will not come live with me? I will create a new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope. No, she said smiling, no. It would have made all the difference, said Humbert Humbert.

All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.

Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?

And what is death, if not a face at peace - its artistic perfection.