Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

302. “As she began losing track of herself, she though it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes – telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression – that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “I qualify it as pathetic. Pathetic – because despite the insatiable fire of my venereal appetite, I intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old child.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

311. “That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one’s individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

312. “Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m’imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. “Monsieur Poe-poe,” as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert’s classes in Paris called the poet-poet.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

313. “Here, I’ll tell you – with my love I could have filled ten centuries of fire, songs, and valour – ten whole centuries, enormous and winged, – full of knights riding up blazing hills – and legends about giants – and fierce Troys – and orange sails – and pirates – and poets.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

314. “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

315. “I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

317. “Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles of wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and the big gear? It seems there’s a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I’ll never find them again – never.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

318. “Great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

321. “I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

322. “I had possessed her – and she never knew it.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

323. “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

324. “No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: ‘There is nothing softer than your heart.’ And I lowered my gaze...”

— Vladimir Nabokov

325. “Forget me now, but remember me afterwards, when the bitter part is forgotten. This.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

326. “What stopped me was the awful feeling that if I meddled with fate in any way and tried to rationalize her fantastic gift, that gift would be snatched away like that palace on the mountain top in the Oriental tale which vanished whenever a prospective owner asked its custodian how come a strip of sunset sky was clearly visible from afar between black rock and foundation.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

327. “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

328. “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

329. “While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life’s full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

330. “There was no Lo to behold.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

331. “Time means succession, and succession, change: Hence timelessness is bound to disarrange Schedules of sentiment.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

332. “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

333. “Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

334. “For the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

335. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

337. “A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

338. “And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only been defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

339. “Nothing happened – or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

340. “With the help of the janitor he screwed on to the side of the desk a pencil sharpener – that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

341. “Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature’s reality, the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

343. “He started as a maker of Cartesian devils – imps of bottle glass bobbing up and down in methylate-filled tubes hawked during Catkin Week on the boulevards. He.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

344. “Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain – the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed – then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

345. “Measure me while I live – after it will be too late.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

346. “I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic’s bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

347. “There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

349. “All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

350. “There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.”

— Vladimir Nabokov