Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

203. “Listen – I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

204. “Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?”

— Vladimir Nabokov

205. “It’s cold today, but in a spring way, and I love you.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

206. “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

207. “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

208. “It did not matter, it did not matter. Destroy and forget! But a butterfly in the Park, an orchid in a shop window, would revive everything with a dazzling inward shock of despair... When he could not sleep, as now often happened... he would walk up and down the open terrace, under a haze of stars, in severely restricted meditation, till the first tramcar jangled and screeched in the dawning abyss of the city.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

210. “Sometimes, though, angels smoke-in their sleeves. But when the archangel goes by, they throw their cigarettes away: This is what falling stars are.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

211. “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

212. “To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

214. “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

215. “I don’t belong to any club or group. I don’t fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

216. “A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

217. “She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

218. “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

219. “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

220. “Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

221. “In life, as in chess, it is always better to analyze one’s motives and intentions.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

222. “No free man needs a God; but was I free?”

— Vladimir Nabokov

223. “Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended the destinies of the quick.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

224. “The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: “First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull.” Kinbote: “You appreciate particularly the purple passages?” Shade: “Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

225. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

227. “In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

228. “Oh, don’t cry, I’m so sorry I cheated so much, but that’s the way things are.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

229. “I, on my part, was as naive as only a pervert can be.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

230. “Let me repeat with quite force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow moving tall, with dark soft hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanour.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

231. “One of our sillier Zemblan proverbs says: the lost glove is happy. Promptly.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

232. “The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

233. “Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

234. “I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

235. “I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

236. “There is an old American saying ‘He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

237. “I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

238. “In my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom, postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

239. “I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one’s personal truth.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

240. “The one who kills is always his victim’s inferior.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

241. “No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

242. “There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

243. “At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

244. “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 even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

245. “I tore apart the fantasies of Poe, And dealt with childhood memories of strange Nacreous gleams beyond the adults’ range.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

247. “All dreams are anagrams of diurnal reality.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

248. “I confess, I do not believe in time.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

249. “Of all my Russian books, the defense contains and diffuses the greatest ‘warmth’ which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract Chess is supposed to be.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

250. “I felt curiously aloof from my own self. No temptations maddened me. The plump, glossy little Eskimo girls with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pig faces, evoked even less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had.”

— Vladimir Nabokov