In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth ... and wondering with an immortal Alice at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles - no matter the imminent peril - these asides of the spirit ... are the highest form of consciousness.


Vladimir Nabokov

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Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
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Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
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Good by-aye!" she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you...
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Here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in k...
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You have to be an artist and a madman...
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He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those...
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Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
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if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
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Ink, a Drug.
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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
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A wave would arrive, all out of breath, but, as it had nothing to report, it would disperse in apolo...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to s...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I can only explain my behaviour then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a derang...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that liter...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You couldn't get more original than Laura. Laura. Yes, she was an original, all right. One of a kind...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The color of one's creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in ti...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anythin...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
but that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remain...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a si...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me - not by way of protest, not as a s...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sen...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bl...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very well do with a little rest in this subd...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
My little cup brims with tiddles.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal v...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed betwe...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lolita, luz de mi vida, fuego de mis entrañas. Pecado mío, alma mía. Lo-li-ta: la punta de la len...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon wh...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs throu...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable na...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze
I cannot get out, said the starling
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruin...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I would see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV