Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

253. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

255. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

257. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “Every limit presupposes something beyond it.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

266. “She was all rose and honey.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

276. “With your little claws, Lolita.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

300. “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