Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Lafontaine was wrong: Dead is the mandible, alive the song.

I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor's child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy.

Say, wouldn't Mother be absolutely mad if she found out we were lovers

Life is a message scribbled in the dark. Anonymous.

Il était malin, celui qui a inventé ce truc-là

I said nothing. I pushed her softness back into the room and went in after her. I ripped her shirt off. I unzipped the rest of her, I tore off her sandals. Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; but the scent I traveled upon was so slight as to be practically undistinguishable from a madman's fancy.

As soon as the pegs were driven in and the game started, the man was transfigured. From his habitual, slow, ponderous, rather rigid self, he changed into a terrifically mobile, scampering, mute, sly-visaged hunchback.

He was an amateur of sex lore

Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.

puzzling that such imitations always pander so exclusively to the eye instead of also copying the damp fat feel of live petal and leaf.

O que me põe louco é a natureza dupla desta ninfeta - de todas as ninfetas, quiçá; esta mistura, na minha Lolita, de uma infantilidade terna e sonhadora com uma espécie de horripilante ordinarice, que provém das enfadonhas modelos fotográficas da publicidade e das revistas, com os seus narizinhos travessos...

Two interesting characteristics distinguished Leonard Blorenge, Chairman of French Literature and Language; he disliked Literature and he had no French.

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping , laughing... I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.

Even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice

the conjurer had poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady's new white purse; and lo, the purse was intact

I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a spacetraveller's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego

It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality. I was all covered with Quilty—with the feel of that tumble before the bleeding. The

And yet I shall try again: they are murdering me!--all right, all together once more: they are murdering me! and again: murdering... I want to write this in such a way that you will cover your ears, your membranaceous, simian ears that you hide under strands of beautiful feminine hair--but I know them, I see them, I pinch them, the cold little things, I worry them with my fingers to somehow warm them, bring them to life, render them human, force them to hear me.

This then is my story

Van was positive that not once during a month of love-making had he failed to take all necessary precautions, sometimes rather bizarre, but incontestably trustworthy, and had lately acquired a sheath-like contraceptive device that in Ladore county only barbershops, for some odd but ancient reason, were allowed to sell.

the beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix

He was beloved not for any essential ability but for those unforgettable digressions of his, when he would remove his glasses to beam at the past while massaging the lenses of the present.

we were bristling at each other as if she were still mine.

I may, if I am lucky, tap the deep pathos that pertains to all authentic art because of the breach between its eternal values and the sufferings of a muddled world -- this world, indeed, can hardly be blamed for regarding literature as a luxury or a toy unless it can be used as an up-to-date guidebook.