Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

252. “There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

253. “With your little claws, Lolita.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

254. “There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

255. “We all have such fateful objects – it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another – carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane’s heart always break.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

256. “Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

257. “Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day which I first knew with certainty that the red convertible was following us.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

258. “She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

259. “Her lips were like large crimson polyps.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

260. “At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

262. “I swear I am happy. I have realized that the only happiness in this world is to observe, to spy, to watch, to scrutinize oneself and others, to be nothing but a big, slightly vitreous, somewhat bloodshot, unblinking eye. I swear that this is happiness.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

263. “Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?”

— Vladimir Nabokov

264. “I love you, my sun, my life, I love your eyes-closed- all the little tails of your thoughts, your stretchy vowels, your whole soul from head to heels.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

266. “It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

267. “Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

268. “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

269. “A poet’s purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

270. “This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My Calender is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don’t think I can go on. Heart, head – everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat til page is full, printer.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

271. “I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

273. “Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as None has cried out. Now I shall try what none Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

274. “Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

275. “My heart seemed everywhere at once.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

276. “She looked around, loosened her bra, and turned over on her stomach to give her back a chance to be feasted upon. She said she loved me. She sighed deeply.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

277. “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

278. “Lolita should make all of us – parents, social workers, educators – apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

279. “It stood to reason that if the evil designer – the destroyer of minds, the friend of fever – had concealed the key of the pattern with such monstrous care, that key must be as precious as life itself and, when found, would regain for Timofey Pnin his everyday health, his everyday world.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

280. “She was all rose and honey.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

281. “He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

282. “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. 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

283. “Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

284. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

286. “On such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen mud and horror in my heart.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

287. “I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

288. “You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

289. “It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

290. “The problem lies not with the characters within the novel, but with the reader itself.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

291. “You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

292. “I do not see any essential difference between abstract and primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not generalize in these matters: It is the individual artist that counts.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

293. “I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don’t seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

294. “My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

295. “She entered his life without knocking, as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague resemblance to one’s own. She stayed there forgetting the way out and quietly getting used to the strange creatures she found there.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

296. “Physically, he was a sickly bald-headed man resembling a pallid gland. His.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

297. “Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

298. “The mind writes with a pen, the heart, with a pencil.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

299. “Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

300. “I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously; reveling in the new life-harmony which I was creating.”

— Vladimir Nabokov