Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

If sex is the sermon made of art, love is the lady of that tower.

my family despised Faberge objects as emblems of grotesque garishness.

Leave your incidental Dick.

Nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a Base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled.

Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

Nothing happened--or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind.

All dreams are anagrams of diurnal reality.

what stars, what thought and sadness up above, and what ignorance below.

Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say.

If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look.

I am not concerned with the moron, the ordinary hairless ape, who takes everything in his stride; his only childhood memory is of a mule that bit him; his only consciousness of the future a vision of board and bed. What I am thinking of is the man of imagination and science, whose courage is infinite because his curiosity surpasses his courage.

wszystko, co budzi zachwyt wywo?any wiecznym zbli?aniem si? do celu, czeka zag?ada.

No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: 'There is nothing softer than your heart.' And I lowered my gaze...

Unfortunately his urge to write had suddenly petered out and he did not know what to do with himself. He was not sleepy having slept after dinner. The brandy only added to the nuisance. He was a big heavy man of the hairy sort with a somewhat Beethovenlike face. He had lost his wife in November. He had taught philosophy. He was exceedingly virile. His name was Adam Krug.

All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.

I put everything into my poetry that I should have put into my life, and now it's too late for me to start all over again. The only thought that occurs to me at the moment is that in the final reckoning it's better to have been sanguine by temperament, a man of action, and if you must get drunk do it properly and smash the place up.

I will never go back. For the simple reason that all the Russia I need, after all, is with me--always with me. Her literature, her language, my own Russian childhood. I will never return, I will never surrender.

in a livid wet dress, under the tumbling mist... had run ecstatically up that ridge above Moulinet to be felled there by a thunderbolt.

Amikor korábbi önmagunkra emlékezünk, mindig ott van az a hosszú árnyékot vetÅ' kis figura, amely mint egy bizonytalan, megkésett vendég áll meg a megvilágított küszöbön egy kifogástalanul sz?külÅ' folyosó túlsó végén.

My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.

The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

I do not want, John. You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.

Certain tight parentheses have been opened and allowed to spill their still active contents.