Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

252. “Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

253. “I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls... There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

254. “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

255. “Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

256. “The more gifted and talkative one’s characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

257. “Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

258. “She was all rose and honey.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

259. “Your silence was effortless and windless, like the silence of clouds or plants. All silence is the recognition of a mystery. There was much about you that seemed mysterious. A.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

261. “But that mimosa grove-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

262. “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

263. “And let me not leave out the moon – for surely there must be a moon, the full, incredibly clear disc that goes so well with Russian lusty frosts. So there it comes, steering out of a flock of small dappled clouds, which it tinges with a vague iridescence; and, as it sails higher, it glazes the runner tracks left on the road, where every sparkling lump of snow is emphasized by a swollen shadow.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

264. “It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

265. “Turning one’s novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

266. “A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

267. “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

268. “Blue evenings in Berlin, the corner chestnut in flower, light-headedness, poverty, love, the tangerine tinge of premature shoplights, and an animal aching yearn for the still fresh reek of Russia...”

— Vladimir Nabokov

269. “Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

270. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

272. “I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

274. “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

275. “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

276. “I have never seen a more lucid, better balanced, mad mind than mine.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

277. “Every limit presupposes something beyond it.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

278. “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

279. “Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?”

— Vladimir Nabokov

280. “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

281. “With your little claws, Lolita.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

282. “I have always had a number of parts lined up in case the muse failed. A lepidopterist exploring famous jungles came first, then there was the chess grand master, then the tennis ace with an unreturnable service, then the goalie saving a historic shot, and finally, finally, the author of a pile of unknown writings- Pale Fire, Lolita, Ada- which my heirs discover and publish.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “Freedom for the moment is everything.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

287. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

289. “Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

290. “As Ganin looked up at the skeletal roof in the ethereal sky he realized with merciless clarity that his affair with Mary was ended forever. It had lasted no more than four days – four days which were perhaps the happiest days of his life. But now he had exhausted his memories, was sated by them, and the image of Mary, together with that of the old dying poet, now remained in the house of ghosts, which itself was already a memory.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

291. “See you soon my strange joy, my tender night.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

292. “For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

293. “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

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. “My heart seemed everywhere at once.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

296. “A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

297. “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

298. “Thus the story describes a full circle... a vicious circle as all circles are, despite their posing as apples, or planets, or human faces.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

299. “Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

300. “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