Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Did I ever mention that her bare arm bore the 8 of vaccination? That I loved her hopelessly? That she was only fourteen?

Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp

He wants everything to be so simple—as, alas, it never is in real life!

Important lecture!' cried Pnin. 'What to do? It is a catastroph!

I am not handsome, I am not interesting, I am not talented. I am not even rich. But, Lise, I offer you everything I have, to the last blood corpuscle, to the last tear, everything. And, believe me, this is more than any genius can offer you because a genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do. I may not achieve happiness, but I know I shall do everything to make you happy.

my own company being intolerable, since it excited me too much and to no purpose

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.

I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze.

So I lingered there, pretending, in front of my own self, that I had something to write

I was passionately parched; but she began to whimper in an unusually dreary way when I attempted to fondle her

The greater part of him was in a quite different place, while only an insignificant portion of it was wandering, perplexed.

my own desire for her blinds me when she is near

the only real, genuinely unquestionable thing here was only death itself

I'll die if you touch me, I said. You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this. No, she said. No, honey, no. She had never called me honey before.

I entered a plane of being where nothing mattered, save the infusion of joy brewed within my body. What had begun as a delicious distention of my innermost roots became a glowing tingle which now had reached that state of absolute security, confidence and reliance not found elsewhere in conscious life.

That Voice in the Mist rang out in the dimmest passage of my mind. It was but the echo of some possible truth, a timely reminder: don't be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.

She groped for words. I supplied them mentally. (He broke my heart. You merely broke my life).

What stopped me was the awful feeling that if I meddled with fate in any way and tried to rationalize her fantastic gift, that gift would be snatched away like that palace on the mountain top in the Oriental tale which vanished whenever a prospective owner asked its custodian how come a strip of sunset sky was clearly visible from afar between black rock and foundation.

Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas

for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac—these are not only vivid characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. "Lolita" should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.

The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave', as a poet might have said. But I am not poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder.

I mesmerized him with it, I saturated him with my vision, I pressed upon him, with a drunkard's wild generosity, all that I was helpless myself to put into verse.

To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling—oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss

If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too