Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Tudod, a halálban az a legrettenetesebb, hogy az ember olyan tökéletesen magára marad.

So I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little windows. And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naively lascivious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it was still a nymphet's scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests.

the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher

As it happens with many people who do not trouble about religion in the ordinary trend of life, I hastily invented a soft, warm, tear-misty God, and whispered an informal prayer. Let me get there in time, let him hold out till I come, let him tell me his secret. Now it was all snow: the glass had grown a grey beard.

Dr. Falternfels was writing and smiling; his sandwich was half unwrapped; his dog was dead.

One was the common one with writers of his type: the bridging of the abyss lying between expression and thought; the maddening feeling that the right words, the only words are awaiting you on the opposite bank in the misty distance, and the shudderings of the still unclothed thought clamouring for them on this side of the abyss. He

az ostobaság ugyanis mindig a zsúfoltság szinonimája, és semmi sincs jobban tele, mint egy üres fej.

Next morning, his nose still in the dreambag of a deep pillow contributed to his otherwise austere bed by sweet Blanche (with whom, by the parlour-game rules of sleep, he had been holding hands in a heart-breaking nightmare– or perhaps it was just her cheap perfume), the boy was at once aware of the happiness knocking to be let in. He deliberately endeavored to prolong the glow of its incognito by dwelling on the last vestiges of jasmine and tears in a silly dream...

A szemek. Ada sötétbarna szeme. VégsÅ' soron mi is a szem (kérdezi Ada)? Két lyuk az élet maszkján.

There is nothing so banal in the world,' said Ada 'than pitching stones at a hawfinch.

The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund's last breath.

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Dostoevski's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity—all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of sinning their way to Jesus or, as a Russian author Ivan Bunin put it more bluntly, spilling Jesus all over the place.

Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them

I see the steam of the chocolate and the plates of blueberry tarts.

Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

What further concentration is needed, what added intensity must one's gaze attain, for the brain to enslave the visual image of a person?

Las aptitudes artísticas no son caracteres sexuales secundarios, como han dicho ciertos charlatanes y chamanes, sino todo lo contrario: la sexualidad está al servicio del arte.

I am here through an error—not in this prison, specifically—but in this whole terrible, striped world; a world which seems not a bad example of amateur craftsmanship, but is in reality calamity, horror, madness, error—and look, the curio slays the tourist, the gigantic carved bear brings its wooden mallet down upon me.

While you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away.

In an Anglo-Saxon thriller, the villain is generally punished, and the strong silent man generally wins the weak babbling girl, but there is no governmental law in Western countries to ban a story that does not comply with a fond tradition, so that we always hope that the wicked but romantic fellow will escape scot-free and the good but dull chap will be finally snubbed by the moody heroine.

The village schoolmaster took us for instructive walks ('what you hear is the sound of a scythe being sharpened' ; 'that field there will be given a rest next season ';'oh, just a small bird...no special name '; 'if that peasant is drunk, it is because he is poor ') 71

Everything he said should be followed by a big sic

To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms -- some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh.