Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

None could discern in him the shyness that makes a person so conspicuous among people who know each other well and are bound together by the established echoes of private jokes and by an allusive residue of people's names that to them are alive with special significance, making the newcomer feel as if the magazine story he has started to read had really begun long ago ... and he wonders if they have not deliberately contrived a conversation to which he is a stranger.

Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.

In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee: "Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight." It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability - a most singular case, I presume - of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest.

Dying, dying, Lolita Haze, Of hate and remorse I'm dying. And again my hairy fist I raise, And again I hear you crying.

When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.

I appeal to parents: never, never say, Hurry up, to a child. (62)

Where the devil did you get her? I beg your pardon? I said: the weather is getting better. Seems so. Who's the lassie? My daughter. You lie - she's not. I beg your pardon? I said: July was hot.

After all, there is no harm in smiling.

There is nothing louder than an American hotel; and, mind you, this was supposed to be a quiet, cozy, old-fashioned, homey place - 'gracious living' and all that stuff.

realidade (uma das poucas palavras que só fazem sentido entre aspas)

I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls ... There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.

See you soon my strange joy, my tender night.

We all admire the spangled acrobat with classic grace meticulously walking his tight rope in the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sagging rope expert wearing scarecrow clothes and impersonating a grotesque drunk! I should know.

And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb, A school of Freudians headed for the tomb.

Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as None has cried out. Now I shall try what none Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.

Although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.

It's cold today, but in a spring way, and I love you.

I swear I am happy. I have realized that the only happiness in this world is to observe, to spy, to watch, to scrutinize oneself and others, to be nothing but a big, slightly vitreous, somewhat bloodshot, unblinking eye. I swear that this is happiness.

In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel—and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride.

A wave would arrive, all out of breath, but, as it had nothing to report, it would disperse in apologetic salaams.

No free man needs a God; but was I free?

Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!

S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.

I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup.