Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra - these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known.

I was less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret.

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.

I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's work) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

Like so many aging college people, Pnin had long since ceased to notice the existence of students on the campus.

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their nature, which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as "nymphets."

Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.

[On adultery:] A most conventional way to rise above the conventional.

In high art and pure science detail is everything.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.

I confess, I do not believe in time.

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.

I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece

Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Words without experience are meaningless.

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.