Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

Ada girl, adored girl, [...] I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.

My patient was one of those singular and unfortunate people who regard their heart (“a hollow, muscular organ,” according to the gruesome definition in Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, which Pnin’s orphaned bag contained) with a queasy dread, a nervous repulsion, a sick hate, as if it were some strong slimy untouchable monster that one had to be parasitized with, alas.

Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care.

As far back as I can remember myself — and I remember myself with lawless lucidity, I have been my own accomplice, who knows too much, and therefore is dangerous.

…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.

I’m walking out now into the soft light, the cooling hum of evening, and I will love you tonight, and tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and still many more, so very many more tomorrows. — Vladimir Nabokov, in a letter to his wife Véra [March 1925] Letters to Véra, tr. by Olga Voronin & Brian Boyd

O my Carmen, my Carmen!
Something, something those something nights
And the stars, and the cars, and the bars and the barmen ~

It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author.

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

Years of secret suffering had taught me superhuman self-control.

the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense–-

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.

It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art.

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. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann.

Treading the soil of the moon, palpating 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...