Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Stirless, I stand at the window, and in the black bowl of the sky glows like a golden drop of honey the mellow moon

I shall vomit,' said Hugh, 'if you persist in pestering me with all that odious rot.'

To the Winds, Victor was a problem child insofar as he refused to be one.

The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole with greater or lesser distinction (like the swell and fall of uneven breathing), now rolling up this image, now that, letting it ride in the wind, or even tossing it out on the shore, where it seems to move and live for a minute on its own and presently is drawn back again by grey seas where it sinks or is strangely transfigured.

The worst madman is the one who fails to consider the possibility of somebody else being mad too.

Remembrance, embers and membranes of beauty make artists and morons lose all self-control.

Life, love, libraries, have no future.

I felt curiously aloof from my own self. No temptations maddened me. The plump, glossy little Eskimo girls with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pig faces, evoked even less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had.

The dining-room was curiously impersonal, like all places where people eat,—perhaps because food is our chief link with the common chaos of matter rolling about us.

I love being bossed by you, but every game has its rules.

One of our sillier Zemblan proverbs says: the lost glove is happy. Promptly

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. By

Hayal et beni; sen hayal etmezsen var olamam ben; içimde, kendi günah?m?n orman?nda titreyen ceylan? sezinlemeye çal??; hatta biraz da gülümseyelim. Ne de olsa, gülümsemekten bir zarar gelmez.

The organs concerned in the production of English speech sounds are the larynx, the velum, the lips, the tongue (that punchinello in the troupe), and, last but not least, the lower jaw; mainly upon its overenergetic and somewhat ruminant motion did Pnin rely when translating in class passages in the Russian grammar or some poem by Pushkin. If his Russian was music, his English was murder.

It had lasted no more than four days—four days which were perhaps the happiest days of his life. But now he had exhausted his memories, was sated by them, and the image of Mary, together with that of the old dying poet, now remained in the house of ghosts, which itself was already a memory. Other than that image no Mary existed, nor could exist.

The hoary judge put his mouth close to his ear, panted for a moment, made the announcement and slowly moved away, as though ungluing himself.

I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows and a queer accent, and a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile.

A superficial reader of Proust's work- rather a contradiction in terms since a superficial reader will get so bored, so engulfed in his own yawns, that he will never finish the book- [the] inexperienced reader, let us say... will probably conclude that the main action of the book is a series of parties; for example, a dinner occupies a hundred and fifty pages, a soirée half a volume.

One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained rectangles and its asymmetrical position—a knight's move from the top—always strangely disturbed me.

Unattached details take all the sparkle out of your conversation.

Physically, he was a sickly bald-headed man resembling a pallid gland. His

Ami azt illeti, Vannak kezdtek nagyon tetszeni a fák is, a csodák is meg az Adák is.

The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities.

Las regiones apacibles y vagas en que me movía eran patrimonio de los poetas, no el terreno del crimen