Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

Vladimir Nabokov

I hastened to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier.

Vladimir Nabokov

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

Vladimir Nabokov

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

Vladimir Nabokov

Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!

Vladimir Nabokov

I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

Vladimir Nabokov

A moment later I heard my sweetheart running up the stairs. My heart expanded with such force that it almost blotted me out. I hitched up the pants of my pajamas, flung the door open: and simultaneously Lolita arrived, in her Sunday frock, stamping, panting, and the she was in my arms, her innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws, my palpitating darling!

Vladimir Nabokov

I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth.

Vladimir Nabokov

while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

Vladimir Nabokov

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Vladimir Nabokov

And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.

Vladimir Nabokov

I confess, I do not believe in time.

Vladimir Nabokov

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

Vladimir Nabokov

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

Vladimir Nabokov

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

Vladimir Nabokov

I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.

Vladimir Nabokov

To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

Vladimir Nabokov

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

Vladimir Nabokov

The tiny madman in his padded cell.

Vladimir Nabokov

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Vladimir Nabokov