Quotes About Nabokov

Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.

I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness…I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended […]

It is nothing but a kind of microcosmos of communism—all that psychiatry,' rumbled Pnin, in his answer to Chateau. 'Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?

I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

And the most poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the chorus.

I think she always nursed a small mad hope.

All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.

This, to use an American term in which discovery, retribution, torture, death, eternity appear in the shape of a singularly repulsive nutshell, was it.

I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.

Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.

Actually he was a pessimist, and, like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man.

two lumpy old ladies in semitransparent raincoats, like potatoes in cellophane…

the gin kept my heart alive but bemazed my brain

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, my Lolita.

If there is anything of which I am certain in life it is that I shall never exchange the liberty of my exile for the vile parody of home.

It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle

Good by-aye! she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this.

Dying, dying, Lolita Haze, Of hate and remorse I'm dying. And again my hairy fist I raise, And again I hear you crying.

Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!

I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

Stilletos of a frozen stillicide [...] In the lovely line heading this comment the reader should note the last word. My dictionary defines it as 'a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop.' I remember having encountered it for the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy. The bright frost has eternalized the bright eavesdrop.

An oak is a tree. A rose is a flower. A deer is an animal. A sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable. P. Smirnovsky, A Textbook of Russian Grammar