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cb48d77
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And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible - and there is absolutely nobody like him.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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1be26d1
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The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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62d54c2
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Ink, a Drug.
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writing
ink
writers-on-writing
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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384ca80
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She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b20409d
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Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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360db24
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hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)...
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9a557a9
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Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0f70fe6
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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.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6996385
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I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. ...I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0f777c6
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Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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066d432
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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.
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humor
insightful
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ab82c35
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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. 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.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c77e7d7
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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000edd4
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In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a fain..
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nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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21d84d4
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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. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade mov..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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7c99dda
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A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.
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time
impermanence
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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2092af3
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ea9a8a7
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I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f2326f6
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There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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763a168
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Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot we..
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poets
pedophilia
soldiers
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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fb1fa02
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Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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89de6dd
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Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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078d646
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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 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 broke..
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words
literature
reading
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f4684b8
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Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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cdf7aeb
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He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.
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sleep
pnin
wrist
left-handed
vladimir-nabokov
insomnia
left
insomniac
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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867e770
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I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass Hang all the furniture above the grass, And how delightful when a fall of snow Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so As to make chair and bed exactly stand Upon..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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62a2d02
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It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love you - and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created - out of five vowels and three consonants.
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love
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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93181af
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We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to..
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words
literature
reading
language
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0ee35b6
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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.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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35441e6
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Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b119395
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The square root of I is I.
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philosophy
self
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ae53914
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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.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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7b1bc16
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I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane...
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e411c85
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Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love - from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter- to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behaviour of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, t..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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1523b74
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The lost glove is happy.
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loss
melancholy
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ec084de
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Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then - not in dreams - but..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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cc34fb0
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My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes) "we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed." "... Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying here." "There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita."
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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043b924
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There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6d4fad7
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For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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c3e21a3
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Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "b..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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84b8a52
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But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9b9e601
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Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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66b7a96
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but that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since." "this then is my story. i have reread it. it has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. at this or that twist of it i feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than i care to prob..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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94e1bdc
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Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought -- and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.
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love
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Vladimir Nabokov |