Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Let us not look for the soul of Russia in the Russian novel: let us look for the individual genius. Look at the masterpiece, and not at the frame—and not at the faces of other people looking at the frame.

They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so as to be overheard by anyone who might be listening, that they were contemplating moving, when all at once the fiend was gone, as happens with the moskovett , that bitter blast, that colossus of cold air that blows on our eastern shores throughout March, and then one morning you hear the birds, and the flags hang flaccid, and the outlines of the world are again in place.

The two lads were told to wash their hands. The recent thrill of adventure had been superseded by another sort of excitement. They locked themselves up. The tap ran unheeded. Both were in a manly state and moaning like doves.

It had glistening eyes like sad black olives.

Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive

Because you took advantage of a sinner because you took advantage because you took because you took advantage of my disadvantage …

I felt that way not because I never once discovered any palpable hard young throat to crush among the masculine mutes that flickered somewhere in the background; but because it was to me overwhelmingly obvious (a favorite expression with my aunt Sybil) that all varieties of high school boys - from the perspiring nincompoop whom holding hands thrills, to the self-sufficient rapist with pustules and a souped-up car - equally bored my sophisticated young mistress.

He never saw that dress again and when he mentioned it in retrospective evocation she invariably retorted that he must have dreamt it

The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.

I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around.

the artist in me has been given the upper hand over the gentleman.

My habit of being silent when displeased, or, more exactly, the cold and scaly quality of my displeased silence, used to frighten Valeria out of her wits. She used to whimper and wail, saying 'Ce qui me rend folle, c'est que je ne sais à quoi tu penses quand tu es comme ça.' I tried being silent with Charlotte – and she just chirped on, or chucked my silence under the chin. An astonishing woman!

she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

I almost said—trying to find some casual remark—'I wonder sometimes what has become of the little McCoo girl, did she ever get better?'—but stopped in time lest she rejoin: 'I wonder sometimes what has become of the little Haze girl . . .

De ha gyorsan végezzük a m?veletet, ha a kitörölhetetlen b?nöket két gyors szellemesség között említjük, akkor van rá esély, hogy magának az életnek érzéstelenítÅ'je csillapíthatja a felejthetetlen kínt, ajtajának egy gyors lendítésével.

Problems are the poetry of chess. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity.

In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future?

for she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum.

behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate

Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses

It was like some dreadful silent ballet, the male dancer holding the ballerina by her foot and streaking down through watery twilight.

at the peak of this human agonised, selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again - and "oh no," Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure - all would be shattered

Mas o amor, dizia ele, era tudo menos credível, a vida real era ridícula, os labregos riam-se do amor.