Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Actually she was at least in her late twenties (I never established her exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods.

Yes, I think that of all his books this is my favourite one. I don't know whether it makes one "think," and I don't much care if it does not. I like it for its own sake. I like its manners.

A jövÅ' azonban mit sem törÅ'dik érzéseinkkel és fantáziálásunkkal. A jövÅ' minden pillanatban a szétágazó lehetÅ'ségek végtelenje.

Yo me empecinaba en mi paraíso escogido: Un paraíso cuyos cielos tenían el color de las llamas infernales, pero con todo un paraiso

making klv zdB AoyvBno wkh gwzxm dqg kzwAAqvo a gwttp vq wjfhm Ada in natural bower of aspens xliC mujzikml.

All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.

On Saturday, they will have an evening of…aphorisms. Everyone must think of an aphorism on the subject of suffering and pleasure.

Antes de conocernos ya habíamos tenido los mismos sueños. Comparamos anotaciones. Encontramos extrañas afinidades.

I notice a whiff of Swift in some of my notes. I too am a desponder in my nature, an uneasy, peevish, and suspicious man, although I have my moments of volatility and fou rire.

I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.

Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.

When a hypothesis enters a scientist's mind, he checks it by calculation and experiment, that is, by the mimicry and the pantomime of truth. It's plausibility infects others, and the hypothesis is accepted as the true explanation for the given phenomenon, until someone finds its faults.

Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? Is that a crime? I countered, and they all laughed.

T)here exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time.

Average reality begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture.

Look at the harlequins! [...] All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together—jokes, images—and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!

As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs.

There is yet another reason why I cannot, nor wish to, believe in God: the fairy tale about him is not really mine, it belongs to strangers, to all men; it is soaked through by the evil-smelling effluvia of millions of other souls that have spun about a little under the sun and then burst…

I'm walking out now into the soft light, the cooling hum of evening, and I will love you tonight, and tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and still many more, so very many more tomorrows. — Vladimir Nabokov, in a letter to his wife Véra [March 1925] Letters to Véra , tr. by Olga Voronin & Brian Boyd

By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane.

I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth.

Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.

The evening is the time to praise the day

The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale's white church tower when I looked around me for the last time.