Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Yet I have known madness not only in the guise of an evil shadow. I have seen it also as a flash of delight so rich and shattering that the very absence of an immediate object on which it might settle was to me a form of escape.

Many fellow exils of mine denounce indignantly (and in this indignation there is a pinch of pleasure) fashionable abominations, including current dances. But fashion is a creature of man's mediocrity, a certain level of life, the vulgarity of equality, and to denounce it means admitting that mediocrity can create something (whether it be a form of government or a new kind of hairdo) worth making a fuss about.

It is certainly not then -- not in dreams -- but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); [...] By bribing a nurse I won access to some files and discovered, with glee, cards calling me "potentially homosexual" and "totally impotent.

Alone, unknown, unloved, I die...and the room had grown a ghostly thorax, with a heart unknown, unloved - but not alone

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul, Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

El sentido moral de los mortales es el precio que debemos pagar por nuestro sentido mortal de la belleza.

Ero un mostro pentapodo, ma ti amavo. Ero ignobile e brutale e turpido e tutto quello che vuoi, ma ti amavo, ti amavo! E c'erano momenti in cui sapevo come ti sentivi, e saperlo era l'inferno.

I should have known (by the signs made to me by something in Lolita -- the real child Lolita or some haggard angel behind her back) that nothing but pain and horror would result form the expected rapture. Oh, winged gentleman of the jury!

There was an ecstasy, a madness about her frolics that was too much of a glad thing.

Mi corazón debe seguir andando. Excepto si tú ya fueras mi destino…

How would you say "delightful talk" in Russian?' 'How would you say "good night"?' Oh, that would be: Bessónnitza, tvoy vzor oonýl i stráshen; lubóv' moyá, otstóopnika prostée. (Insomnia, your stare is dull and ashen, my love, forgive me this apostasy.)

To myself I whispered that I still had my gun, and was still a free man -- free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother.

A couple of years before, under the guidance of an intelligent French-speaking confessor, to whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a Protestant's drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure, I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being.

Come la famiglia universale degli scrittori di talento supera le barriere nazionali, così il lettore dotato è una figura universale, non soggetta a leggi spaziali o temporali. È lui - il buon lettore, l'eccellente lettore - che ha salvato più e più volte l'artista dalla distruzione per mano degli imperatori, dei dittatori, dei preti, dei puritani, dei filistei, dei politici, dei poliziotti, dei direttori delle poste e dei pedanti.

I am a pickpocket, not a burglar.

Moth holes had appeared in the plush of matrimonial comfort.

The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since the bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God's living light, then Ivan died into a new life—Life with a capital L.

oh, mi angustia..., ¿qué haré contigo, conmigo mismo?

I did not rush up to her room with cries. I always preferred the mental hygiene of noninterference.

I dreamt of you last night—as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.

neither being accustomed to his new fleshiness and insistence to sleep on one side only, so as not to hear his heart: he had made the mistake one night in 1920 of calculating the maximal number of its remaining beats (allowing for another half-century), and now the preposterous hurry of the countdown irritated him and increased the rate at which he could hear himself dying.

It may well be that the very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised—the great rosegray never-to-be-had.