Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.


Vladimir Nabokov

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Life is not a game. Still, in this life, we choose the games we live to play.
J.R. RIM
Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
No other photographer had such immediate and intimate access to Nabokov over so many years, ... Vlad...
BRIAN BOYD
Life is a re-discovery.
BRIAN BLESSED
If you think that life is a celebration full of party poppers and merry go rounds it's not it's a ga...
GARY F EVANS...
Life Is a Misconception.
DEYTH BANGER
Life is a desire!
DEYTH BANGER
To trust someone you must firstly remember that it is a two way street that will go all the way if y...
GARY F EVANS...
It is a lie.
ARTHUR MILLER
For me, my life is a journey.
JAY ELECTRONICA
Life is a game and true love is a trophy.
RUFUS WAINWRIGHT
Love isn't the work of the tender and the gentle;
Love is the work of wrestlers.
The one w...
JALALUDDIN MEVLANA RUMI
The opportunity to decieve others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception...
SAM HARRIS
Life is a risk.
CARMELO ANTHONY
Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
PAT CONROY
Life is a journey. When we stop, things don't go right.
POPE FRANCIS
Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.
TED TURNER
My little cup brims with tiddles.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Life is a school of probability.
WALTER BAGEHOT
This life is a process of learning.
LAURYN HILL
Life is a process. We are a process. The universe is a process.
ANNE WILSON SCHAEF
Everybody in life is a chameleon.
MELANIE CHISHOLM
His life seemed like a deck of cards, and in the midst of all those two’s and three’s someone ha...
TEKOA MANNING
I wanted to tell you that I just--I miss you. And maybe that sounds ridiculous--like we barely know ...
TAMMARA WEBBER
Life is a grand party.
EZRA MILLER
I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
..."offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual"...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Beautiful things happen in your life,if you distance yourself from all the negative things.
DR ANIL KUMAR SINHA
She was scarcely a year older than I was, dark-haired, slender, with a face that would break your he...
GEORGE R.R. MARTIN
Life is a mountain of solvable problems, and I enjoy that.
JAMES DYSON
My life is a struggle.
VOLTAIRE
Life is a lot like skateboarding.
LIL WAYNE
All life is a manifestation of the spirit, the manifestation of love.
MORIHEI UESHIBA
For me, life is a bowl of cherries.
SISSY SPACEK
Life is a right, not collateral or casual.
SUHEIR HAMMAD
Don't be more serious than God. God invented dog farts. God designed your body's plumbing system. Go...
PETER KREEFT
Mother Superior jump the gun...
-The Beatles, Happiness is a Warm Gun
LAUREN MYRACLE
As a movement (rather than a preference), the goal of antinatalism is that no humans should have chi...
QUENTIN S. CRISP
Life is a journey and it's about growing and changing and coming to terms with who and what you ...
KELLY MCGILLIS
A lot of people ask for sequels, but what they really want is just to know the characters are happy ...
KRISTAN HIGGINS
Humor writing requires a rhythm and timing, as well as some kind of connection to the reader, and I ...
KRISTAN HIGGINS
Stephen picks up on Armstrong's pier, and calls Kingstown pier "a disappointed bridge" (2.22)...
JAMES JOYCE
Good by-aye!" she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Girl! I'm here to make you look Fa-Bu-Lous!
FAKE CINNA
Now, as I understand it, the bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were fe...
ALAN MOORE
All of life is a foreign country.
JACK KEROUAC
A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.
MADAME DE STAEL
To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Life is a kind of struggle. Life is a sort of fight.
HAILE GEBRSELASSIE
For all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.
PEDRO CALDERON DE LA BARCA
Life is a predicament which precedes death.
HENRY JAMES
Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.
JACK KEROUAC
Life is a series of waves to be embraced and overcome.
DANNY MEYER
Life is a soccer field, don't you think?
SHAKIRA
What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Life is a matter of courtship and wooing, flirting and chatting.
CAROLYN SEE
When he entered the anteroom, two women looked up at him. One was Miss Robertson, the governor's sec...
GEORGE P. ELLIOTT
Life is a racket. Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything's a racket.
NICK TOSCHES
My number-one website is brainpickings.org. It opens you up to different authors and gives insights ...
BRIE LARSON
Life is a difficult game. You can win it only by retaining your birthright to be a person.
A. P. J. ABDUL KALAM
I think life is a chain of events.
ZARA LARSSON
Life is a marathon, not a sprint. It's about taking a bigger-picture approach.
IVANKA TRUMP
Life is a succession of moments, to live each one is to succeed.
CORITA KENT
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
ANTHONY BURGESS
Life is a lot easier when you realize that you're not in control of it all.
KARRINE STEFFANS
For me life is a challenge. And it will be a challenge if I live to be 100 or if I get to be a trill...
BEAH RICHARDS
Life is a gift, given in trust - like a child.
ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
'The Lunchbox' has been a blessing - all gift-wrapped and tied with a bow. Life is a lunchbo...
NIMRAT KAUR
When someone beats a rug,
the blows are not against the rug,
but against the dust in it.
JALALUDDIN MEVLANA RUMI
What I've learned is that life is a balance between idealism and realism.
PETER HOOK
Be grateful for every moment and every breath.
TERESA COLLINS
Baseball life is a tough life on the family.
NOLAN RYAN
Not only is forgiveness the most tender part of love, it is always a choice and always accompanied b...
RHONDA LOUISE ROBBINS
I believe that there is a Matrix and... to be more accurate I am in the Pornography Matrix.
DEYTH BANGER
Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
EUGENE O'NEILL
Our life is a series of moments. Let them all go. Moments. All gathering towards this one.
NOW IS GOOD
My life is a series of things that just happen.
HAROLD RUSSELL
Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint you can at it.
DANNY KAYE
Life is a blur when one is essaying different roles; it is so fulfilling.
AMITABH BACHCHAN
Life is a matter of really tough choices.
JOE BIDEN
Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Life is a series of chapters, and one leads to another to another to another, and God knows what it ...
BOB BECKEL
Truth is like a flower, if you tend to it and leave it in the sunshine, it will blossom into somethi...
ANGIE KARAN
I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing ...
JOHN MUIR
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
TOM STOPPARD
Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise.
GEORGE GERSHWIN
Anything which interferes with my social life is a no-no.
CILLA BLACK
There is a club in this world that you do not join knowingly.

One day you are just a memb...
JOHNA PASSARO
My life is a mosaic, and there's no room in between pieces at all.
MARCIA CLARK
Life is a mystery. Life is uncertain. It makes one feel a bit wobbly to realize that.
REBECCA PIDGEON
... the logic of supernatural horror [is] a logic founded on fear, a logic whose sole principle stat...
THOMAS LIGOTTI
Life is a magical game so play it with love.
DEBASISH MRIDHA
I believe that life is a journey towards God, and that no one has the right to insist that you go a ...
PAT BUCKLEY
The truth is you don't know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing ...
EMINEM
Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C.
Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing t...
DALE CARNEGIE
The message is that I was reminding myself and informing others of the fact that God has always been...
ANDRAE CROUCH

More Vladimir Nabokov

And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especiall...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly rec...
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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze o...
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was you...
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers,...
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Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and ge...
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I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom.
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
I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn s...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, f...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The tiny madman in his padded cell.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and ...
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Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event,...
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
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Solitude is the playfield of Satan. - Pale Fire, 1962.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to en...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the read...
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For m...
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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the h...
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Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss som...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Caress the detail, the divine detail.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, t...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme met...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling ...
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before bein...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in in...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of he...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the st...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
There was no Lo to behold.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Har...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. Sh...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, tr...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily ap...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The distinct feature of everything extant is its monotony.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Words without experience are meaningless.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—En...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lolita
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that liter...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their l...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exa...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
And the rest is rust and stardust.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Dear Jesus, do something.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imag...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the mos...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
My sin, my soul.
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the to...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Caress the detail, the divine detail
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
Genius is an African who dreams up snow
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Other men die; but I Am not another; therefore I'll not die
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the first - a dull man writing broken English, the second - ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
For me, a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic b...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Solitude is the play field of Satan
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
[Against whom was it turned? Against whom did he conspire?] Tum-tee-tum. And once more - TUM! ... I ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in in...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
- A sentyment staje się uciążliwy. W końcu jest coś nazbyt fizycznego w próbie zachowania czą...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, ban...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You must be careful. There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, hap...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness....
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Good by-aye!" she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in k...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You have to be an artist and a madman...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. Sh...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of partin...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poiso...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Ink, a Drug.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything i...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the sa...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
But even in such works where the author is ideally unobtrusive, he remains diffused through the book...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
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...
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I can only explain my behaviour then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a derang...
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They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so ...
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At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
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I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that liter...
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It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting...
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You couldn't get more original than Laura. Laura. Yes, she was an original, all right. One of a kind...
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My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
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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
I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV