Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

The strange mirage-shimmer standing in for death should not appear too soon in the chronicle and yet it should permeate the first amorous scenes.

And a tiny looper caterpillar would be there, too, measuring, like a child's finger and thumb, the rim of the table, and every now and then stretching upward to grope, in vain, for the shrub from which it had been dislodged.

In my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom, postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves.

I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.

A real hansom-cab took him from the station to Trinity College: the vehicle, it seemed, had been waiting there especially for him, desperately holding out against extinction till that moment, and then gladly dying out to join side whiskers and the Large Copper.

Que rara es la vida! La suerte nos abandona cuando más propicia deseamos que nos sea.

Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father's maternal grandfather had been, say, a Turk.

Only a Chinaman or a retarded child can imagine being met, in that Next-Installment World, to the accompaniment of all sorts of tail-wagging and groveling of welcome, by the mosquito executed eighty years ago upon one's bare leg, which has been amputated since then and now, in the wake of the gesticulating mosquito, comes back, stomp, stomp, stomp, here I am, stick me on.

Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m'imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. "Monsieur Poe-poe," as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert's classes in Paris called the poet-poet.

For I do not exist: There exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.

Szétesése fokozatosan történt, és mindegyik fokozata gyötrelmesebb volt az elÅ'zÅ'nél; az emberi agy ugyanis a legjobb kínzókamra bír lenni mindazok közül, melyeket kieszelt, létrehozott és használt évek millióin át, földek millióiban, üvöltÅ' teremtmények millióin.

His brown eyes would roam around the various sentimental and artistic bric-a-brac present, and his own banal toiles (the conventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars, blue nipples and geometrical designs of the day), and with a vague gesture toward a painted wooden bowl or veined vase, he would say Prenez donc une des ces poires. La bonne dame d'en face m'en offre plus que je n'en peux savourer. Or: Mississe Taille Lore vient de me donner ces dahlias, belles fleurs que j'exècre.

I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.

More and more uncomfortable did Humbert feel. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.

It is fun to be present at the coming true of a dream, even if it is not one's own.

Death often is the point of life's joke.

Ez a "most" az egyetlen realitás, amit ismerünk; a már-nem színes semmijét követi, és a jövÅ' abszolút semmijét elÅ'zi meg. Így egészen szó szerinti értelemben mondhatjuk, hogy a tudatos emberi élet mindig csak egy pillanatig tart, mert a saját tudatáramunkra irányuló szándékos figyelem egyetlen pillanatában sem tudhatjuk, hogy követi-e újabb pillanat.

Lolita should make all of us — parents, social workers, educators — apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.

His mind was a turmoil of words and fancies, incomplete fancies and insufficient words, but already he knew that this and only this was the reality of his life.

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

Es espantoso cuando la vida real de pronto resulta ser un sueño, pero ¡cuánto más espantoso cuando lo que uno ha creído que era un sueño —fluido e irresponsable— de pronto empieza a cuajarse como realidad!

I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.

No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He

Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that, in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, life is a joke) I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.' Lolita, Part II, Chapter 31