Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Hardly had the Farlows gone than a blue-chinned cleric called—and I tried to make the interview as brief as was consistent with neither hurting his feelings nor arousing his doubts. Yes, I would devote all my life to the child's welfare. Here, incidentally, was a little cross that Charlotte Becker had given me when we were both young. I had a female cousin, a respectable spinster in New York. There we would find a good private school for Dolly. Oh, what a crafty Humbert!

Je me retrouvai seul, roulant sous la pluie du jour agonisant, et les essuie-glace étaient en pleine action, mais que pouvaient-ils contre mes larmes ?

Yet if prior to life we had Been able to imagine life, what mad, Impossible, unutterably weird, Wonderful nonsense it might have appeared!

what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own";

In life, as in chess, it is always better to analyze one's motives and intentions.

Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque, A dull dark white against the day's pale white And abstract larches in the neutral light.

Palm trees are all right only in mirages.

But I want to make sure of our whereabouts and whenabouts,' said Van. 'It is a philosophical need.

repeat however for the benefit of those who like books to provide them with "real people" and "real crime" and a "message" (that horror of horrors borrowed from the jargon of quack reformers) that Dead Souls will get them nowhere.

Van... even then, at fourteen, recognized that the old myths, which willed into helpful being a whirl of worlds (no matter how silly and mystical) and situated them within the gray matter of the star-suffused heavens, contained, perhaps, a glowworm of strange truth. His nights in the hammock... were now haunted not so much by the agony of his desire for Ada, as by that meaningless space overhead, underhead, everywhere, the demon counterpart of divine time...

Najdraži san jednog autora jeste da pretvori ?itaoca u gledaoca.

Aquello que se escribió con esfuerzo se lee con facilidad

Vagyst?-geriausias komplimentas,kok? galima pasakyti daiktui.

Actually the question of mortal precedence has now hardly any importance. I mean, the hero and heroine should get so close to each other by the time the horror begins, so organically close, that they overlap, intergrade, interache, and even if Vaniada's end is described in the epilogue we, writers and readers, should be unable to make out (myopic, myopic) who exactly survives, Dava or Vada, Anda or Vanda.

El lector debe comprender que, dueño y señor de una nínfula, el encantado viajero está, por así decirlo, más allá de la felicidad.

Mama mea, femeie fotogenic?, a murit în modul cel mai absurd (picnic, tr?snet) când aveam trei ani ÅŸi, în afara unui nor de c?ldur? în umbra trecutului, ea n-a l?sat nici o urm? pe drumurile pustii ale amintirii peste care a apus soarele copil?riei mele.

Para mí, una obra de ficción sólo existe en la medida en que me proporciona lo que llamaré, lisa y llanamente, placer estético, es decir, la sensación de que es algo, en algún lugar, relacionado con otros estados de ánimo en que el arte (curiosidad, ternura, bondad, éxtasis) es la norma.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, my Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Goodness, what crazy purchases were prompted by the poignant predilection Humbert had in those days for check weaves, bright cottons, frills, puffed-out short sleeves, soft pleats, snug-fitting bodices and generously full skirts! Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties

Fat fate's formal handshake () brought me out of my torpor; and I wept. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury - I wept.

She was all rose and honey.

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open, and soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve.

Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject's displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal.

When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.