Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

“I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is”

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

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

“Genius is an African who dreams up snow”

“Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words”

“Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts”

“Solitude is the play field of Satan”

“To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute”

“A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection”

“Caress the detail, the divine detail”

“Here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .”

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

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

I think it is all a matter of love the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes

I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her –after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred–I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever–for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)–and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again–and oh, no, Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure–all would be shattered.

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

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece

Dont cry, Im sorry to have deceived you so much, but thats how life is.

Let all of life be an unfettered howl.

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.