Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

52. “And blood-black nothingness began to spin. A system of cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

53. “Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly .”

— Vladimir Nabokov

54. “Most of the dandelions had changed from suns into moons.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

55. “I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

56. “I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

57. “Words without experience are meaningless.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

58. “Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise – a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames – but still a paradise.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

59. “The square root of I is I.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

60. “What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness – that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidts the night of non-being.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

61. “Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

62. “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.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

63. “Genius is an African who dreams up snow.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

64. “I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais!”

— Vladimir Nabokov

65. “Solitude was corrupting me.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

66. “Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

67. “Time is but memory in the making.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

68. “Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

69. “Our imagination flies – we are its shadow on the earth.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

70. “Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

71. “A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...”

— Vladimir Nabokov

72. “My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God; but was I free?”

— Vladimir Nabokov

73. “Don’t cry, I’m sorry to have deceived you so much, but that’s how life is.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

74. “Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

75. “All the information I have about myself is from forged documents.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

76. “We think not in words but in shadows of words.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

77. “Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

78. “I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago – but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man’s child. She could fade and wither – I didn’t care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

79. “Some people – and I am one of them – hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

81. “Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

82. “In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

83. “My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

84. “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

85. “We are most artistically caged.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

86. “A major writer combines these three – storyteller, teacher, enchanter – but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

87. “Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

88. “A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

89. “Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

90. “Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

91. “Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

92. “The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

93. “My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

94. “One is always at home in one’s past...”

— Vladimir Nabokov

95. “I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

96. “He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

97. “Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

98. “Beauty plus pity – that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

99. “A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

100. “All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.”

— Vladimir Nabokov