Best Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov (Top 10)
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And the rest is rust and stardust.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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."
Vladimir Nabokov
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Toska - noun /ËtÅ-skÉ/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
Vladimir Nabokov
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
Vladimir Nabokov
More Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that's when you get shooting stars.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That's what I like about coincidence.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
Vladimir Nabokov
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...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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. Lo. Lee. Ta.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world's muteness.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brainthe brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashedthen its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius."
Vladimir Nabokov
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The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
Vladimir Nabokov
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It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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!
Vladimir Nabokov
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There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.
Vladimir Nabokov
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My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Caress the detail, the divine detail.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
Vladimir Nabokov
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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
Vladimir Nabokov