Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (137 Quotes)

If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look.

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.

My little cup brims with tiddles.

Feeling a bit nervous, as most people do at the prospect of seeing a doctor, I thought I would buy on my way to him something soothing to prevent an accelerated pulse from misleading credulous science.

Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care.

I'm thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art, And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita.

While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.

My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.

I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.

I felt my life needed a shake-up.

The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.

Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.

Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?

No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.

I notice a whiff of Swift in some of my notes. I too am a desponder in my nature, an uneasy, peevish, and suspicious man, although I have my moments of volatility and fou rire.

I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.

There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.

In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.

Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?

Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.

Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with

There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art.

Words without experience are meaningless.

Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy.

The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.

I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. ...I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

This, to use an American term in which discovery, retribution, torture, death, eternity appear in the shape of a singularly repulsive nutshell, was it.

It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.