Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2023 Update)
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51. “Genius is an African who dreams up snow.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

52. “I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

53. “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

54. “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

55. “I don’t think in any language. I think in images.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

56. “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

57. “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

58. “Solitude was corrupting me.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

64. “The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

67. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

72. “The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

73. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

75. “Words without experience are meaningless.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

80. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

82. “We are most artistically caged.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

95. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

100. “I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.”

— Vladimir Nabokov