Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “A good laugh is the best pesticide.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

352. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

360. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

364. “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

365. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

382. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

385. “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

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. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

391. “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

392. “This night the password was silence.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

394. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

400. “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