Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

He tried to recall his best moments with her, but those moments were poisoned forever.

No," she said. "No, honey, no." She had never called me honey before. "No," she said, "it is quite out of the question. I would sooner go back to Cue. I mean—" She groped for words. I supplied them mentally ("He broke my heart. You merely broke my life").

Y entonces supe que lo más punzante no era la ausencia de Lolita a mi lado, sino la ausencia de su voz en ese concierto

El delicioso hecho íntimo ocurrido anoche había sido la causa de que todo el caleidoscopio de su vida variara, y había evocado el pasado de un modo avasallador.

Then Van and Ada met in the passage, and would have kissed at some earlier stage of the Novel's Evolution in the History of Literature.

Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for

What's so awful is that one can't tear up the past by its roots. One can't tear it out, but one can hide one's memory of it.

She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; ...while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.

And when he went to bed and listened to the trains passing through that cheerless house in which lived several Russian lost shades, the whole of life seemed like a piece of film-making where heedless extras knew nothing of the picture in which they were taking part.

But that mimosa grove--the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since--until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.

Penso agli uri e agli angeli, al segreto dei pigmenti duraturi, ai sonetti profetici, al rifugio dell'arte. E questa è la sola immortalità che tu e io possiamo condividere, mia Lolita.

Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me;

For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art is the norm.

Moj posao je ?okolada. ?okolada je dobra stvar. Ima curica koje vole samo gorku... probirljiva mala prenemagala. (Ne razumem zašto ovo pišem).

Solitude was corrupting me...My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.

reality" (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes)

And I also knew that the child, my child, knew he was looking, enjoyed the lechery of his look and was putting on a show of gambol and glee, the vile and beloved slut

And what I say is not it, not quite it, and I am getting mixed up, getting nowhere, talking nonsense, and the more I move about and search in the water where I grope on the sandy bottom for a glimmer I have glimpsed, the muddier the water grows, and the less likely it becomes that I shall grasp it.

expecting every moment some awful change, some diabolical sneer to disfigure the dear face bending over you

She was soon ready, and they kissed tenderly in their hallway, between lift and stairs, before separating for a few minutes. 'Tower,' she murmured in reply to his questioning glance, just as she used to do on those honeyed mornings in the past, when checking up on happiness: 'And you?' 'A regular ziggurat.

I heard my sweetheart running up the stairs. My heart expanded with such force that it almost blotted me out. I hitched up the pants of my pajamas, flung the door open: and simultaneously Lolita arrived, in her Sunday frock, stamping, panting, and then she was in my arms, her innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws, my palpitating darling!

the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open..

Enchia-me o peito uma tempestade de soluços.

Not knowing how to write, but sensing with my criminal intuition how words are combined, what one must do for a commonplace word to come alive and to share its neighbor's sheen, heat, shadow, while reflecting itself in its neighbor and renewing the neighboring word in the process, so that the whole line is live iridescence…