Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Who cares,' cried Van, 'who cares about all those stale myths, what does it matter—Jove or Jehovah, spire or cupola, mosques in Moscow, or bronzes and bonzes, and clerics, and relics, and deserts with bleached camel ribs? They are merely the dust and mirages of the communal mud.

Nuestra conciencia de existir no es un punto en la eternidad, sino una fisura, una falla, una grieta que se extiende a todo lo ancho del tiempo metafísico y lo parte en dos mitades y se dibuja luminosa (por estrecha que sea) entre los dos tableros del antes y el después.

he was more of a poltergeist than a lodger

At Christmas parties games were rough, no doubt, And one shy little guest might be left out; But let's be fair: while children of her age Were cast as elves and fairies on the stage That she'd helped paint for the school pantomime, My gentle girl appeared as Mother Time, A bent charwoman with a slop pail and broom, And like a fool I sobbed in the men's room.

In other more deeply moral worlds than this pellet of muck, there might exist restraints, principles, transcendental consolations, and even a certain pride in making happy someone one does not really love; but on this planet, Lucettes are doomed.

I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); teasing them with fake "primal scenes"; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one's real sexual predicament

Such incidents have convinced me that my heart is basically sound despite recent diagnoses.

I now wondered if Valechka (as the colonel called her) was really worth shooting, or strangling, or drowning. She had very vulnerable legs, and I decided I would limit myself to hurting her very horribly as soon as we were alone.

La muerte no era otra cosa que una reunión más completa de los infinitos fragmentos de la soledad.

Yo pienso que en esto radica el sentido de la creación literaria: en la descripción de objetos ordinarios tal y como quedarán reflejados en los espejos amables de los tiempos futuros; en encontrar en los objetos que nos rodean la ternura fragante que sólo la posteridad podrá discernir y apreciar en los lejanos tiempos venideros en los que cada minucia de nuestra aburrida vida cotidiana se convertirá en algo exquisito y festivo por derecho propio

Una noche de 1920 había cometido el error de calcular (contando con otro medio siglo de existencia) cuántos latidos le quedaban aún y ahora la absurda rapidez de la cuenta atrás le irritaba y aceleraba el ritmo en el que se oía morir.

Ich weiß nicht, ob jemals festgestellt wurde, daß ein Hauptmerkmal des Lebens die Separatheit ist. Wenn uns keine Fleischesschicht umhüllt, sterben wir. Der Mensch existiert nur in dem Maße, in dem er von seiner Umwelt abgesondert ist.

I remember once handling an automatic belonging to a fellow student, in the days (I have not spoken of them, I think, but never mind) when I toyed with the idea of enjoying his little sister, a most diaphanous nymphet with a black hair bow, and then shooting myself.

Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive. A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.

Love, most likely. They don't know how dreary it is, how degrading.

When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel was no nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right, on that same enchanted island of time;

beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.

am quite willing to admit that they are also a deception but right now I believe in them so much that I infect them with truth.

Reno, a dreary town in Nevada

I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity?

Yaln?zca düÅŸünceler dünyas?nda deÄŸil, nesneler dünyas?nda da ya??yoruz biz. Deneyim olmaks?z?n kelimeler anlams?zd?r.

What a misunderstanding" said Cincinnatus and suddenly burst out laughing. He stood up and took off the dressing gown, the skullcap, the slippers. He took off the linen trousers and shirt. He took off his head like a toupee, took off his collarbones like shoulder straps, took off his rib cage like a hauberk. He took off his hips and his legs, he took off his arms like gauntlets and threw them in a corner. What was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly coloring the air.

Mother, what's chtonic?" That, too, you'd explain, Appending: "Would you like a tangerine?" "No. Yes. And what does sempiternal mean?" You'd hesitate. And lustily I'd roar The answer from my desk through the closed door.

I was laughing happily, and the atrocious, unbelievable, unbearable, and, I suspect, eternal horror that I know now was still but a dot of blackness in the blue of my bliss (...)