Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “See you soon my strange joy, my tender night.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

302. “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

303. “It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

304. “There was no Lo to behold.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

306. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

308. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

310. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

313. “I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor’s child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

314. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

316. “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

317. “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

318. “But I want to make sure of our whereabouts and whenabouts,′ said Van. ‘It is a philosophical need.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

319. “The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

320. “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

321. “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

322. “Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

323. “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

324. “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

325. “La mujer barbuda nos lee las manos y predice lo que seremos, aunque no adivina lo que somos.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

326. “The muse of invention handed me a rifle and I shot a white bear who sat down and said: Ah.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

327. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

331. “A good laugh is the best pesticide.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

332. “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

333. “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

334. “Good by-aye!” she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

336. “But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

337. “You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

338. “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

339. “Here speaks Professor – ′ There followed a preposterous little explosion. ‘I conduct the classes in Russian. Mrs Fire, who is now working at the library part-time –.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

340. “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

341. “I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

342. “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

343. “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

344. “Do those clowns really believe what they teach?”

— Vladimir Nabokov

345. “This night the password was silence, and the soldier at the gate responded with silence to Cincinnatus’ silence and let him pass; likewise at all the other gates.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

346. “I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

347. “There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, ‘schools’ and ‘movements’ are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

348. “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

349. “Because of a streak of dreaminess and a gentle abstraction in his nature, Victor in any queue was always at its very end. He had long since grown used to this handicap, as one grows used to weak sight or a limp.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

350. “Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov’s round of weird visits in Gogol’s “Dead Souls.”

— Vladimir Nabokov