942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.

Natural selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.

There are events, strange happenings, that strikeThe mind as emblematic. They are likeLost similes adrift without a string.Attached to nothing. Thus that northern king, Whose desperate escape from prison wasBrought off successfully only because Some forty of his followers that nightImpersonated him and aped his flight -

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open

He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.

Space' (it says here, rather suggestively) 'denotes the property, you are my property, in virtue of which, you are my virtue, rigid bodies can occupy different positions.' Nice? Nice.

I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

I had possessed her - and she never knew it.

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.