Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita, luce della mia vita, fuoco dei miei lombi. Mio peccato, anima mia. Lo-li-ta: la punta della lingua compie un percorso di tre passi sul palato per battere, al terzo, contro i denti. Lo. Li. Ta.

Tenderness rounds out true triumph, gentleness lubricates genuine liberation: emotions that are not diagnostic of glory or passion in dreams.

Why do you live in hotels? -It simplifies postal matters, it eliminates the nuisance of private ownership, it confirms me in my favorite habit-- the habit of freedom.

The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: "First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull." Kinbote: "You appreciate particularly the purple passages?" Shade: "Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane.

Q: What is the best thing men do? A: To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless.

the compensation for a death sentence is knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die.

I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash.

Blue evenings in Berlin, the corner chestnut in flower, light-headedness, poverty, love, the tangerine tinge of premature shoplights, and an animal aching yearn for the still fresh reek of Russia...

Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart.

And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower.

What (Ada asks) are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life. What (she asks) would they mean to a creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose organ of sight was (say) an internal parasite resembling the written word deified? What, indeed, would a pair of beautiful (human, lemurian, owlish) eyes mean to anybody if found lying on the seat of a taxi?

there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it...

The determinate scheme by stripping the sunrise of it's surprise would erase all sunrays.

the satisfaction of a special Pninian craving.

Elmenni annyi, mint kicsit meghalni, és meghalni annyi, mint kicsit túl messze menni.

Sana anlat?lan?n asl?nda üç aÅŸamal? olduÄŸunu unutma; önce anlatan taraf?ndan biçimlendiÄŸini, sonra dinleyen taraf?ndan yeniden biçimlendiÄŸini, öyküdeki ölmüÅŸ adam?n her ikisinden de saklad??? ÅŸeyler olduÄŸunu.

a halál nem több, csak a magány végtelen töredékeinek teljesebb kollekciója.

In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth ... and wondering with an immortal Alice at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles - no matter the imminent peril - these asides of the spirit ... are the highest form of consciousness.

Az ember úgy érzi… Úgy érzi… – mondta –, hogy csupán valami szerepet játszik, és elfelejtette a következÅ' mondatait.

My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip.

In reading, one should notice and fondle details.

And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain.

All great novels are great fairy tales.

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]