Vladimir Nabokov Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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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 -
“My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
-- Vladimir NabokovSource : Vladimir Nabokov (2016). “Lolita”, p.142, Hamilton Books
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“I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
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“Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
“The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
“I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
“Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“We are most artistically caged.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
“in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
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“Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
“Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
“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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“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”
-- Vladimir NabokovSource : Vladimir Nabokov (2016). “Lolita”, p.149, Hamilton Books
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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.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
“The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
“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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“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!”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
“Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
“There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
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“Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.”
-- Vladimir NabokovSource : Vladimir Nabokov (2016). “Lolita”, p.57, Hamilton Books
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“Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.”
-- Vladimir NabokovSource : Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov”, p.464, Vintage
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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 -
“Toska - noun /ˈtÅ-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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“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 NabokovSource : Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov”, p.46, Vintage
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“Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov
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