Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

L'autre soir un air froid d'opéra m'alita; Son félé -- bien fol est qui s'y fie! Il neige, le décor s'écroule, Lolita! Lolita, qu'ai-je fait de ta vie? Dying, dying, Lolita Haze, Of hate and remorse, I'm dying. And again my hairy fist I raise, And again I hear you crying.

Raising a cold eye from book to clock in the positively sultry Beardsley College library, among bulky young women caught and petrified in the overflow of human knowledge.

The muse of invention handed me a rifle and I shot a white bear who sat down and said: Ah.

Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet.

I noticed with a spasm of fierce disgust that the former Counselor of the Tsar, after thoroughly easing his bladder, had not flushed the toilet. That solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it struck me as a crowning insult, and I wildly looked around for a weapon.

Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man in the tale.

Literature under despotism: "The personality of the artist should develop freely and without restraint. One thing, however, we demand: acknowledgement of our creed." - Dr. Rosenberg, Minister of Culture – Third Reich "Every artist has the right to create freely; but we, Communists, must guide him according to plan." - Lenin pg. 7

The fatal gesture passed like the tail of a falling star across the blackness of the contemplated crime.

Russia - the country of Tolstoy, Stanislavski, Raskolnikov, and other great and good men.

do not know why I was so tormented by your betrayals, rather I myself know why, but I do not know the words I must choose to make you understand why I was so tormented. Such words do not come in the small size that fits your everyday needs.

We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a colleges of dog eared maps, ruined your books, old tires and her sobs in the night- every night, every night- the moment i feigned sleep.

I will create a brand new god and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope.

Living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement.

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses

Finally it gave up- as some day life will give up- bothering me.

her autobiography was as devoid of interests as her autopsy would have been. I never saw a healthier woman than she, despite thinning diets.

Esiste, nella scala dimensionale del mondo, un punto di incontro tra conoscenza ed immaginazione. Un punto al quale si perviene rimpicciolendo le cose grandi ed ingrandendo quelle piccole.

This night the password was silence, and the soldier at the gate responded with silence to Cincinnatus' silence and let him pass; likewise at all the other gates.

Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; but the scent I traveled upon was so slight as to be practically undistinguishable from a mad-man's fancy.

No man can bring about the perfect murder; chance, however, can do it

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.

Un cambio de ambiente es la falacia tradicional sobre la cual descansan los amores -y los pulmones- condenados.

Ngày nay, anh ph?i là má»™t nhà khoa h?c n?u mu?n gi?t ng??i.

Oh, to shout it so that all of you believe me at last, you cruel, smug people...