Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

152. “I am ready to give you all of my blood, if I had to – it’s hard to explain – sounds flat – but that’s how it is.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

153. “The tiny madman in his padded cell.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

154. “I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

155. “Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

156. “I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

157. “Look at this tangle of thorns.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

158. “By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

159. “My characters are galley slaves.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

160. “I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you’ve done to me.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

161. “You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

162. “It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

163. “Without you I wouldn’t have moved this way, to speak the language of flowers.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

164. “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.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

166. “The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

167. “Let all of life be an unfettered howl.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

168. “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

169. “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

170. “You are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought...”

— Vladimir Nabokov

171. “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

172. “Oh, Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe’s and Bea Dante’s, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties?”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

174. “I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

175. “I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

176. “I love you, I’m waiting for you unbearably.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

177. “Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

178. “And what is death, if not a face at peace – its artistic perfection.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

179. “Nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

180. “By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

181. “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy... in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs... the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

182. “The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

183. “There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

184. “Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It’s like passing around samples of sputum.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

185. “His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

186. “Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

188. “I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

189. “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

190. “A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

191. “As it happens with many people who do not trouble about religion in the ordinary trend of life, I hastily invented a soft, warm, tear-misty God, and whispered an informal prayer. Let me get there in time, let him hold out till I come, let him tell me his secret. Now it was all snow: the glass had grown a grey beard.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

192. “Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child’s scrawl on the fence, and the crank’s message in the market place. Art is never simple.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

193. “The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

194. “Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

195. “Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple – these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

196. “I’m walking out now into the soft light, the cooling him of evening, and I will love you tonight, and tomorrow, and still many more, so very many tomorrows.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

197. “The weather this morning was so-so: dullish, but warm, a boiled-milk sky, with skin- but if you pushed it aside with a teaspoon, the sun was really nice, so I wore my white trousers.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

200. “Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.”

— Vladimir Nabokov