Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither

The cell was filled to the ceiling with the oils of twilight, containing extraordinary pigments

A bowling ball rolled through his head, diagonally from nape to temple; it paused and started back

A writer is lost when he grows interested in such questions as 'what is art?' and 'what is an artist's duty?

the compensation for a death sentence is knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned. However, I am being left in that ignorance which is tolerable only to those living at liberty

We all have such fateful objects—it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another—carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.

that the girl forms her ideals of romance and of men from her association with her father

Nuestra existencia no es mas qué un cortocircuito de luz entre dos eternidades de oscuridad.

I have in my head many projects that were begun and interrupted at various times...I simply shall not pursue them if the time remaining before my execution is not sufficient for their ordelry conclusion.

Nos enamoramos simultáneamente, de una manera frenética, impúdica, agonizante. Y desesperada, debería agregar, porque este arrebato de mutua posesión sólo se habría saciado si cada uno se hubiera embebido y saturado realmente de cada partícula del alma y el corazón del otro; pero ahí nos quedábamos ambos, incapaces hasta de encontrar esas oportunidades de juntarnos que habrían sido tan fáciles para los chicos callejeros.

Cincinnatus, after passing many other doors, stumbled, hopped, and found himself in a small courtyard, filled with various parts of the dismantled moon.

the moon stood watch over the familiar statue of a poet that looked like a snowman

In a word, before such an Amazing Offer, before such a vastness and variety of vistas, I was as helpless as Adam at the preview of early oriental history, miraged in his apple orchard.

Esos contactos incompletos producían en nuestros cuerpos jóvenes, sanos e inexpertos, un estado de exasperación tal, que ni aun el agua fría y azul, bajo la cual nos aferrábamos, podía aliviar.

only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries

Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care. My heart was a hysterical, unreliable organ.

I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.

Darkness and silence merged completely

Lei assomiglia in modo eccezionale a sua madre. Non ho mai avuto il piacere di conoscerla di persona, ma Rodrig Ivanovi? mi ha gentilmente promesso di mostrarmela in fotografia».

Înc? de pe când eram copil… eram preg?tit pentru a intra în nefiinÈ›a tihnit? a momâilor mature, în care colegii mei s-au È™i transformat f?r? efort È™i durere…

against the background of that black velvet which lines at night the underside of the eyelids, Marthe's face appeared as in a locket

El dolor quedó en mí, y a partir de entonces ella me hechizó, hasta que, al fin, veinticuatro años después, rompí el hechizo encarnándola en otra.

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

Fragments of these speeches, in which the words 'translucence' and 'opacity' rose and burst like bubbles, now sounded in Cincinnatus's ears, and the rush of blood became applause