Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible

I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.

Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.

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.

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.

And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.

I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t'aimais, je t'aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.

Let all of life be an unfettered howl.

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

I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world's muteness.

The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.

Memory overshadows the present and dims the future "into something thicker than its usual pea soup."

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