Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (137 Quotes)

She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.

If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very well do with a little rest in this subdued, frightened-to-death rocking chair, before I drove to wherever the beast's lair was - and then pulled the pistol's foreskin back, and then enjoyed the orgasm of the crushed trigger.

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.

Look at this tangle of thorns.

Do those clowns really believe what they teach?

She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds.

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.