Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “If his Russian was music, his English was murder.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

361. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

363. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

368. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “This night the password was silence.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

385. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

391. “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

392. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

394. “Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

396. “It’s exactly my sense of existing – a fragment, a wisp of color.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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