Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “Although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man’s life, detail is always welcome.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

352. “Freedom for the moment is everything.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

355. “All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

356. “This night the password was silence.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

360. “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

361. “From my point of view, any outstanding work of art is a fantasy insofar as it reflects the unique world of a unique individual. Art is not just simple arithmetic, it’s a delicate calculus. Keep in mind the passion of the scientist and the precision of the artist.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

362. “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

363. “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

364. “He had liked her enormously, and he loved Krug with the same passion that a big sleek long-flewed hound feels for the high-booted hunter who reeks of the marsh as he leans towards the red fire. Krug could take aim at a flock of the most popular and sublime human thoughts and bring down a wild goose any time. But he could not kill death.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

366. “Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

367. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

369. “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

370. “I am an actor, living generally on air, but I have always elastic hopes for the future; they may be stretched indefinitely, such hopes, without bursting.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

371. “Beaming and melting in smiles of benevolence and self-effacement, they sidled up and plumped down next to Lucette, who turned to them with her last, last, last free gift of staunch courtesy that was stronger than failure and death.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

372. “Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

373. “Unattached details take all the sparkle out of your conversation.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? Is that a crime? I countered, and they all laughed.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

378. “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

379. “I would see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, to a glittering summit where laughing athletes stripped to the waist were waiting for her, for her.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

381. “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

382. “Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

383. “An active and creative reader is a re-reader.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

384. “Genius is non-conformity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

385. “Only experts, for experts, should probe a mind’s misery.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

386. “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

387. “No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

388. “Actually, observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope which a drop of soda had stained,- Bergson is only for very young people or very unhappy people, such as this available rousse.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

389. “What are these hopes, and who is this savior?” “Imagination,” replied Cincinnatus.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

390. “Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

391. “I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

392. “I don’t read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

393. “Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

395. “To her he would surrender the remnants of himself at the first trumpet blast of destiny.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

396. “Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

397. “I love being bossed by you, but every game has its rules.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

398. “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

399. “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

400. “Yes, I think that of all his books this is my favourite one. I don’t know whether it makes one “think,” and I don’t much care if it does not. I like it for its own sake. I like its manners.”

— Vladimir Nabokov