Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

One night between sunset and river On the old bridge we stood, you and I. Will you ever forget it, I queried, - That particular swift that went by? And you answered, so earnestly: Never! And what sobs made us suddenly shiver, What a cry life emitted in flight! Till we die, till tomorrow, for ever, You and I on the old bridge one night.

we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden.

all forms of vitality are forms of velocity, and no wonder a growing child desires to out-Nature Nature by filling a minimum stretch of time with a maximum of spatial enjoyment. Innermost in man is the spiritual pleasure derivable from the possibilities of outtugging and outrunning gravity, of overcoming or re-enacting the earth's pull.

Thus a man looking through a tremendous telescope does not see the cirri of an Indian summer above his charmed orchard, but does see, as my regretted colleague, the late Professor Alexander Ivanchenko, twice saw, the swarming of hesperozoa in a humid valley of the planet Venus.

I was proceeding slowly one afternoon through torrents of rain and kept seeing that red ghost swimming and shivering with lust in my mirror, when presently the deluge dwindled to a patter, and then was suspended altogether.

Delvig's best poem is the one he dedicated to Pushkin, his schoolmate, in January 1815. A boy of sixteen, prophesying in exact detail literary immortality to a boy of fifteen, and doing it in a poem that is itself immortal - this is a combination of intuitive genius and actual destiny to which I can find no parallel in the history of world poetry.

Every limit presupposes something beyond it.

GeçmiÅŸ en soylu yakacakt?r.

Religion is boring and alien to me and relates no more than a chimera to what is to me the reality of the spirit.

I tore apart the fantasies of Poe, And dealt with childhood memories of strange Nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range.

Who grins in official circumstances?

He traveled, he studied, he taught ... He learned to appreciate the singular little thrill of following dark byways in strange towns, knowing well that he would discover nothing, save filth and ennui and discarded merry cans with labels and the jungle jingles of exported jazz. He often felt that the famed cities, the museums, the ancient torture house and the suspended garden were but places on the map of his own madness.

Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality, the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me.

They studied Zoorlandian customs and laws. The region was rocky and windy, and the wind was recognized as a positive force since by championing equality in not tolerating towers and tall trees, it only subserved the public aspirations of atmospheric strata that kept diligent watch over the uniformity of the temperature.

According to my almond-eyed little spy, the great surgeon, may his own liver rot, lied to me when he declared yesterday with a deathhead's grin that the operazione had been perfetta . Well, it had been so in the sense Euler called zero the perfect number. Actually, they ripped me open, cast one horrified look at my decayed fegato , and without touching it sewed me up again.

Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?

before picking up the spilled diamonds, she locked the door and embraced him, weeping — the touch of her skin and silk was all the magic of life, but why does everybody greet me with tears?

We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in Dickens. In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort in order to join the ladies in the drawing room. In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port.

Now I shall speak of evil as none has Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz; The white-hosed moron torturing a black Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac; Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools; Music in supermarkets; swimming pools; Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, 930  Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.

And presently I was shaking hands with both of them in the street, the sloping street, and everything was whirling and flying before the approaching white deluge, and a truck with a mattress from Philadelphia was confidently rolling down to an empty house, and dust was running and writhing over the exact slab of stone where Charlotte, when they lifted the laprobe for me, had been revealed, curled up, her eyes intact, their black lashes still wet, matted, like yours, Lolita.

The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman's effort.

Paduk and all the rest wrote on steadily, but Krug's failure was complete, a baffling and hideous disaster, for he had been busy becoming an elderly man instead of learning the simple but now unobtainable passages which they, mere boys, had memorized.

Mindannyiunknak meg van pecsételve a sorsa, de egyesekké jobban, mint másoké.

There are certain trifles I do not forgive. Not having read the required book. Having read it like an idiot." - John Shade