Quotes About Vladimir

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 […]

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.

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.

Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.

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.

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

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.

Let me repeat with quite force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow moving tall, with dark soft hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanour.

Dostoevski's The Double is his best work though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's Nose.

And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche: ...Beneath the sky Of my America to sigh For one locality in Russia. (a passage not for 'general readers' but for 'idiots')

after an early dinner at The Egg and We, a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure (...)

Oh, Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties?

Yes, I think that of all his books this is my favourite one. I don't know whether it makes one "think," and I don't much care if it does not. I like it for its own sake. I like its manners.

Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? Is that a crime? I countered, and they all laughed.

By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane.