Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

We must thank fate (and the author's thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then he would have been lost. When I want a good nightmare I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume of Dikanka and Mirgorod stuff about ghosts haunting the banks of the Dniepr, burlesque Jews and dashing Cossacks.

In its published form, this book is being read, I assume, in the first years of 2000 A.D. (1935 plus eighty or ninety, live long, my love)...

Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some future events may be likelier than others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta:

Ben Sebastian'?m ya da Sebastian ben ya da belki biz ikimiz ikimizin de tan?mad??? bir ba?kas?y?z.

Alas, the objects I had assembled wander away. The young poplar dims and takes off to return where it had been fetched from. The brick wall dissolves. The house draws in its little balconies one by one, then turns, and floats away. Everything floats away. Harmony and meaning vanish. The world irks me again with its variegated void.

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three

Being mad, he failed to take into account the scheming of irresponsible politicians. Being mad, he believed that other governments would act in accordance with the principles of mercy and common sense.

mirage and reality merge in love

Oh my Carmen, my little Carmen! Something, something, those something nights, And the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen - And, O my charmin', our dreadful fights. And the something town where so gaily, arm in Arm we went, and our final row, And the gun I killed you with, O my Carmen, The gun I am holding now.

This now-ness is the only reality we know; it follows the colored nothingness of the no-longer and precedes the absolute nothingness of the future. Thus, in a quite literal sense, we may say that conscious human life lasts always only one moment, for at any moment of deliberate attention to our own flow of consciousness we cannot know if that moment will be followed by another.

throb-and-sob idol

Te quería, era un monstruo pentápodo, pero te queria. Era despreciable y brutal, y lascivo, y cuanto pueda imaginarse, mais je t'aimais, je t'aimais! Y habia momentos en que sabia todo cuanto sentias y saberlo era un infierno, pequeña mia

what was the name of that hotel, you know [nose puckered], come on, you know—with those white columns and the marble swan in the lobby? Oh, you know [noisy exhalation of breath]—the hotel where you raped me. Okay, skip it. I mean, was it [almost in a whisper] The Enchanted Hunters? Oh, it was? [musingly] Was it

The old and the new, the liberal touch and the patriarchal one, fatal poverty and fatalistic wealth got fantastically interwoven in that strange first decade of our century.

When you wanted me to spend my afternoons sunbathing on the Lake instead of doing my work, I gladly gave in and became a bronzed glamor boy for your sake, instead of remaining a scholar and, well, an educator.

Greek Catholic Church, that mild communion whose demands on one's conscience are so small in comparison with the comforts it offers.

I could see the corridor window, where the wires-six thin black wires-were doing their best to slant up, to ascend skyward, despite the lightning blows dealt them by one telegraph pole after another; but just as all six, in a triumphant swoop of pathetic elation, were about to reach the top of the window, a particularly vicious blow would bring them down, as low as they had ever been, and they would have to start all over again.

In the good old days, by merely twisting fat Valechka's brittle wrist (the one she had fallen upon from a bicycle) I could make her change her mind instantly;

And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a particularly apt one. There are in my notes "Otto Otto" and "Mesmer Mesmer" and "Lambert Lambert," but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best.

What I am thinking of is the man of imagination and science, whose courage is infinite because his curiosity surpasses his courage. Nothing will keep him back...Any true scientist (not, of course,the fraudulent mediocrity, whose only treasure is the ignorance he hides like a bone) should be capable of experiencing that sensuous pleasure of direct and divine knowledge. He may be twenty and he may be eighty-five but without that tingle there is no science.

That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental.

Yatmadan önce okuyabileceÄŸiniz iyi bir kitaba sahip olduÄŸunuzu bilmek zevklerin en büyüÄŸüdür.

Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.