Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “For the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

352. “His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

353. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

354. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

356. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

359. “I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Featured in: Real Quotes

360. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

362. “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

363. “The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave’, as a poet might have said. But I am not poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

364. “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

365. “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

366. “The shock of her death froze something in me. The child I loved, was gone, but I kept looking for her – long after I had left my own childhood behind. The poison was in the wound, you see. And the wound wouldn’t heal.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

368. “So it went on, that obsession and that despair and that nightmarish impossibility to swindle destiny, until a certain first of April, of all dates.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

369. “If his Russian was music, his English was murder.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

370. “If told I am a bad poet, I smile; but if told I am a poor scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

371. “I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

372. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

374. “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

375. “Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being – not a constant state – that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

376. “In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

377. “No matter how many times we read “King Lear,” never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds...”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

379. “A real hansom-cab took him from the station to Trinity College: the vehicle, it seemed, had been waiting there especially for him, desperately holding out against extinction till that moment, and then gladly dying out to join side whiskers and the Large Copper.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

381. “The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

382. “I am here through an error – not in this prison, specifically – but in this whole terrible, striped world;.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

383. “Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father’s maternal grandfather had been, say, a Turk.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

384. “Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

385. “Only a Chinaman or a retarded child can imagine being met, in that Next-Installment World, to the accompaniment of all sorts of tail-wagging and groveling of welcome, by the mosquito executed eighty years ago upon one’s bare leg, which has been amputated since then and now, in the wake of the gesticulating mosquito, comes back, stomp, stomp, stomp, here I am, stick me on.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

387. “My solemn exasperation was to her the silence of love.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

389. “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

390. “She was an extravagantly slender girl. Her ribs showed. The conspicuous knobs of her hipbones framed a hollowed abdomen, so flat as to belie the notion of “belly.” Her exquisite bone structure immediately slipped into a novel – became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

391. “In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel – and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

392. “She had imagination – the muscle of the soul – and her imagination was of a particularly strong, almost masculine quality. She possessed, too, that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying-pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier. And finally she was blest with a keen sense of humour. No wonder she fitted into his life so well.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

393. “One thing should be established once for all, indefeasibly. I loved, love, and shall love only you. I implore you and love you with everlasting pain and passion, my darling.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

394. “My mouth to him was a splendid cave full of priceless treasures, but I denied him entrance.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

395. “I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

396. “To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would – invariably, with icy precision – plump for the former.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

397. “To be quite candid – and what I am going to say now is something I have never said before, and I hope that it provokes a salutary chill – I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

398. “Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

399. “Thus a man looking through a tremendous telescope does not see the cirri of an Indian summer above his charmed orchard, but does see, as my regretted colleague, the late Professor Alexander Ivanchenko, twice saw, the swarming of hesperozoa in a humid valley of the planet Venus.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

400. “She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone save her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov