Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

The melacholy and the tenderness of mortal life; the passion and the pain; The claret tailight of that dwindling plane Off Hesperus; your gesture dismay On running out of cigarettes; the way You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime Snails leave or flagstone; this good ink, this rhyme. This index card, this slender rubber band Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand, Are found in Heaven by the newlydead Stored in its strongholds through the years.

a side door crashing open in life's full fight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster

Her mind kept fading in the growing mist. She still could speak. She paused, and groped, and found What seemed at first a serviceable sound, But from adjacent cells impostors took The place of words she needed, and her look Spelt imploration as she sought in vain To reason with the monsters in her brain.

Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.

I am aware of many things being quite as important as good writing and good reading; but in all things it is wiser to go directly to the quiddity, to the text, to the source, to the essence—and only then evolve whatever theories may tempt the philosopher, or the historian, or merely please the spirit of the day.

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 space-traveler'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.

Uncle Dan was feeding.

I wonder if during the course of these tragic notes, I have sufficiently stressed the sending quality of my striking, if perhaps somewhat brutal good looks". (Humbert in Lolita)

Readers are born free and ought to remain free.

I felt curiously aloof from my own self.

I have hurt too much too many bodies with my twisted poor hands to be proud of them

Can't decide whether dolly has exceptional emotional control or none at all.

sex is but the ancilla of art

And here a life had come apart in darkness, and the room had grown a ghostly thorax, with a heart unknown, unloved -- but not alone.

The true measure of genius is in what measure the world he has created is his own, one that has not been here before him (at least, here, in literature) and, even more important, how plausible he has succeeded in making it.

I felt instinctively that toilets- as also telephones- happened to be for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch

Art is a divine game.

Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others, again (running, water, storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions.

Dobbiamo distinguere tra sentimentale e sensibile. Un sentimentale può essere, nelle ore libere, un autentico bruto.

When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.

To wonder at trifles – no matter the imminent peril – these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest form of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.

The repetition of words and phrases, the intonation of obsession, the hundred percent banality of every word, the vulgar soapbox eloquence mark these elements of Dostoevski's style.

Stop moping! she would cry: Look at the harlequins! What harlequins? Where? Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together jokes, images and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!

Nuestra imaginación vuela, nosotros somos su sombra en la tierra.