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809e2c3
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In the fatal course of the most painful ailments, sometimes [...], sometimes there occur sweet mornings of perfect repose- and that not owning to some blessed pill or potion [...] or at least without our knowing that the loving hand of despair slipped us the drug.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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f0207b8
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There are few physiques I loathe more than the heavy low-slung pelvis, thick calves and deplorable complexion of the average coed (in whom I see, maybe, the coffin of coarse female flesh within which my nymphets are buried alive).
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female-body
humbert-humbert-humbert
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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319e76f
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Death," he had said on another occasion, "seems to be merely a bad habit, which nature is at present powerless to overcome."
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b640fef
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The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.
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writer
writing
reader
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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81e9611
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She looked around, loosened her bra, and turned over on her stomach to give her back a chance to be feasted upon. She said she loved me. She sighed deeply.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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867db2c
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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).
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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fff4425
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On Du Bois] Celebrated Negro scholar and organizer. 70 years old, but looks 50. Dusky face, grizzled goatee, nice wrinkles, big ears -- prodigiously like a White Russian General in mufti played sympathetically by Emil Jannings. Piebald hands. Brilliant talker, with an old-world touch. Tres gentilhomme. Smokes special Turkish cigarettes. Charming and distinguished in other, more important, ways. Told me that when he went to England he was li..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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bf77968
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But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years - problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space,..
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time
i-am-because
space
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e5e332a
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Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words; a man who had only to breathe on any particle of his stupendous vocabulary to have that particle live and expand and throw out tremulous tentacles until it became a complex image with a pulsing brain and correlated limbs. Three centuries later, another man, in another country, was trying to render these rhythms and metaphors in a different tongue. This process..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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72b93cc
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I am quite willing to admit that they are also a deception but right now I believe in them so much that I infect them with truth.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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a3c11c6
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Any future is unknown - but sometimes it acquires a particular fogginess, as if some other force had come to the aid of destiny's natural reticence and distributed this resilient fog, from which thought rebounds.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0c3433b
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There, tam, la-bas, the gaze of men glows with inimitable understanding; there the freaks that are tortured here walk unmolested; there time takes shape according to one's pleasure, like a figured rug whose folds can be gathered in such a way that two designs will meet--and the rug is once again smoothed out, and you live on, or else superimpose the next image on the last, endlessly, endlessly, with the leisurely concentration of a woman se..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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bf53ba2
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I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a "young girl," and then, into a "college girl"--that horror of horrors."
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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2bba33b
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My sweetheart, my love, my love, my love--do you know what--all the happiness of the world, the riches, power and adventures, all the promises of religions, all the enchantment of nature and even human fame are not worth your two letters. It was a night of horror, terrible anguish, when I imagined that your undelivered letter, stuck at some unknown post office, was being destroyed like a sick little stray dog . . . But today it arrived--and..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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46dd196
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My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit, Or, with a silent shiver, order it, Whatever in my field of vision dwelt - An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte Stilettos of a frozen stillicide - Was printed on my eyelids' nether side Where it would tarry for an hour or two, And while this lasted all I had to do Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ef32a68
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The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.
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poetry
writing
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e1fbaae
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Of students' papers: 'I am generally very benevolent [said Shade]. But there are certain trifles I do not forgive.' Kinbote: 'For instance?' 'Not having read the required book. Having read it like an idiot. Looking in it for symbols; example: "The author uses the striking image green leaves because green is the symbol of happiness and frustration." I am also in the habit of lowering a student's mark catastrophically if he uses "simple" and ..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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2b0c330
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Another part of the ritual was to ascend with closed eyes. 'Step, step, step,' came my mother's voice as she led me up - and sure enough, the surface of the next tread would receive the blind child's confident foot; all one had to do was lift it a little higher than usual, so as to avoid stubbing one's toe against the riser. This slow, somewhat somnambulistic ascension in self-engendered darkness held obvious delights. The keenest of them w..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6cdc2a7
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I was always lonely and I am lonely still.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4018d2d
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I had once been splintered into a million beings and objects. Today I am one, tomorrow I shall splinter again. And thus everything in the world decants and modulates. That day I was on the crest of a wave. I knew that all my surroundings were notes of one and the same harmony, knew - secretly - the source and the inevitable resolution of the sounds assembled for an instant, and the new chord that would be engendered by each of the dispersin..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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7bf136b
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Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce's poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like it? He did. In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors and ardors and Adas
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b5784eb
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I broke her spell by incarnating her in another
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6d09b1f
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I'm walking out now into the soft light, the cooling him of evening, and I will love you tonight, and tomorrow, and still many more, so very many tomorrows.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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689a2bd
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God does not exist, as neither does our hereafter, that second bogey being as easily disposed of as the first. Indeed, imagine yourself just dead--and suddenly wide awake in Paradise where, wreathed in smiles, your dear dead welcome you. Now tell me, please, what guarantee do you possess that those beloved ghosts are genuine; that it is really your dear dead mother and not some petty demon mystifying you, masked as your mother and imperson..
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heaven
god
atheism
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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4dbe73a
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The idea of God was invented in the small hours of history by a scam who had genius; it somehow reeks too much of humanity, that idea, to make its azure origin plausible...
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god
atheism
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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0ad3375
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Your voice, through the beelike hum, was remote and anxious. It kept sliding into the distance and vanishing. I spoke to you with tightly shut eyes, and felt like crying. My love for you was the throbbing, welling warmth of tears. That is exactly how I imagined paradise: silence and tears, and the warm silk of your knees. This you could not comprehend.
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love
vladimir-nabokov
paradise
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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75e3507
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Old Azureus's manner of welcoming people was a silent rhapsody. Ecstatically beaming, slowly, tenderly, he would take your hand between his soft palms, hold it thus as if it were a long sought treasure or a sparrow all fluff and heart, in moist silence, peering at you the while with his beaming wrinkles rather than with his eyes, and then, very slowly, the silvery smile would start to dissolve, the tender old hands would gradually release t..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6d1ef88
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I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously; reveling in the new life-harmony which I was creating.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9efe7a0
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We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.
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philosophy
stockings
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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6bcec4d
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Where the devil did you get her?" "I beg your pardon?" "I said: the weather is getting better." "Seems so." "Who's the lassie?" "My daughter." "You lie - she's not."
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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b0fc969
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He had liked her enormously, and he loved Krug with the same passion that a big sleek long-flewed hound feels for the high-booted hunter who reeks of the marsh as he leans towards the red fire. Krug could take aim at a flock of the most popular and sublime human thoughts and bring down a wild goose any time. But he could not kill death.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e9f5475
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I had always thought that wringing one's hands was a fictional gesture -- the obscure outcome, perhaps, of some medieval ritual; but as I took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate meditation, this was the gesture ("look, Lord, at these chains!") that would have come nearest to the mute expression of my mood."
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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ee0b2e1
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It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e569268
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Two silent time zones had now merged to form the standard time of one man's fate; and it is not impossible that the poet in New Wye and the thug in New York awoke that morning at the same crushed beat of their Timekeeper's stopwatch.
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fate
time
destiny
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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5c739fe
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Go on from here, Ada, please. (She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics an..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d7e5b02
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Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer's black nights, what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became as transparent as boxes of glass!
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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16a4ba7
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The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy.
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lolita
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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e811e78
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Nos queriamos con amor prematuro, con la violencia que a menudo destruye vidas adultas
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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d689014
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Era Lo, sencillamente Lo, por la manana, un metro cuarenta y ocho de estatura con pies descalzos. Era Lola con pantalones. Era Dolly en la escuela. Era Dolores cuando firmaba. Pero en mis brazos era siempre Lolita.
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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9b5ac02
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That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out.
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common-sense
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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fcf2b6b
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My angel, oh my angel, perhaps our whole earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like "dental" and "transcendental" (remember?), and the true meaning of reality, of that piercing term, purged of all our strange, dreamy, masquerade interpretations, now sounds so pure and sweet that you, angel, find it amusing that we could have taken the dream so seriously (although you and I did have an inkling of why ever..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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48e3205
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It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to do me a refined aesthetic favor, had touched my sleeve and said, "I want you to meet-" and led me to Nina, who sat in the corner of a couch, her body folded Z-wise, with an ashtray at her heel, and she took a long turquoise cigarette holder from her lips and joyfully, slowly exclaimed, "Well, of all people-" and then all evening my heart felt..
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in
spring
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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41be592
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During the two months of our stay at Biarritz, my passion for Colette all but surpassed my passion for Cleopatra. Since my parents were not keen to meet hers, I saw her only on the beach; but I thought of her constantly. If I noticed she had been crying, I felt a surge of helpless anguish that brought tears to my own eyes. I could not destroy the mosquitoes that had left their bites on her frail neck, but I could, and did, have a successful..
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Vladimir Nabokov |
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201a02e
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She was an extravagantly slender girl. Her ribs showed. The conspicuous knobs of her hipbones framed a hollowed abdomen, so flat as to belie the notion of "belly." Her exquisite bone structure immediately slipped into a novel - became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems."
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Vladimir Nabokov |