Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2025 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. “You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

372. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

376. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

382. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

384. “Feeling a bit nervous, as most people do at the prospect of seeing a doctor, I thought I would buy on my way to him something soothing to prevent an accelerated pulse from misleading credulous science.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

385. “This night the password was silence.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

392. “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

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. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform... them... that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

398. “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

399. “No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov