Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 10

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

103. “I think she always nursed a small mad hope.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

104. “It’s a pity one can’t imagine what one can’t compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

105. “Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

106. “Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

107. “Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

108. “For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

109. “Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

110. “It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love you – and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created – out of five vowels and three consonants.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

111. “I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

112. “My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

113. “All great novels are great fairy tales.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

114. “The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

115. “Solitude is the playfield of Satan.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

116. “I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

117. “I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

118. “Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

119. “A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish – but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

120. “The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

121. “The evening is the time to praise the day.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

122. “Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

123. “Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?”

— Vladimir Nabokov

124. “And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb, A school of Freudians headed for the tomb.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

125. “Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

126. “Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

127. “The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

128. “Everything was too quiet to be natural. It seemed as if the silence was rising, rising – would suddenly brim over and break into laughter.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

129. “The moral sense in mortals is the duty We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

131. “Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

132. “It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

133. “All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

134. “All things considered, it had been his home, and the set of kindly, well-meaning, gentle-mannered people driven to death or exile for the sole crime of their existing, was the set to which he too belonged. His dark youthful broodings, the romantic – and let me add, somewhat artificial – passion for his mother’s land, could not, I am sure, exclude real affection for the country where he had been born and bred.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

135. “Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

136. “There is only one school of literature – that of talent.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

137. “Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

139. “The only consciousness that persists in the hereafter is the consciousness of pain.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

140. “All religions are based on obsolete terminology.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

141. “I see the steam of the chocolate and the plates of blueberry tarts.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

142. “Fragments of these speeches, in which the words ‘translucence’ and ‘opacity’ rose and burst like bubbles, now sounded in Cincinnatus’s ears, and the rush of blood became applause.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

143. “Who cares,′ cried Van, ‘who cares about all those stale myths, what does it matter – Jove or Jehovah, spire or cupola, mosques in Moscow, or bronzes and bonzes, and clerics, and relics, and deserts with bleached camel ribs? They are merely the dust and mirages of the communal mud.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

144. “The future is but the obsolete in reverse.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

145. “My little cup brims with tiddles.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

146. “Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

147. “Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

148. “In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future?”

— Vladimir Nabokov

149. “And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov