Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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.

We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Janes heart always break.

The square root of I is I.

All religions are based on obsolete terminology.

You have to be an artist and a madman...

Light in comparison with darkness is a void.

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.

Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

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. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express ones position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollos natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: There is nothing softer than your heart. And I lowered my gaze...

- A sentyment staje się uciążliwy. W końcu jest coś nazbyt fizycznego w próbie zachowania cząstki dzieciństwa na swoim mostku. - Nie pan pierwszy sprowadza wiarę do zmysłu dotyku.

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

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.

Ink, a Drug.

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.