Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

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.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

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

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

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.

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

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.

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.

Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.

Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.

...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.

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.

Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.

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

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed—then 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.

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."

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.

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.

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!

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

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.

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.

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?

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