942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

No wonder tobacco shops have a predilection for corners, for.

To the sound of this voice, to the music of the chessboard’s evil lure, Luzhin recalled, with the exquisite, moist melancholy peculiar to recollections of love, a thousand games that he had played in the past... There were combinations, pure and harmonious, where thought ascended marble stairs to victory; there were tender stirrings in one corner of the board, and a passionate explosion, and the fanfare of the Queen going to its sacrificial doom.

The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale’s white church tower when I looked around me for the last time.

She looked around, loosened her bra, and turned over on her stomach to give her back a chance to be feasted upon. She said she loved me. She sighed deeply.

All things considered, it had been his home, and the set of kindly, well-meaning, gentle-mannered people driven to death or exile for the sole crime of their existing, was the set to which he too belonged. His dark youthful broodings, the romantic – and let me add, somewhat artificial – passion for his mother’s land, could not, I am sure, exclude real affection for the country where he had been born and bred.

I was proceeding slowly one afternoon through torrents of rain and kept seeing that red ghost swimming and shivering with lust in my mirror, when presently the deluge dwindled to a patter, and then was suspended altogether.

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

Two silent time zones had now merged to form the standard time of one man’s fate; and it is not impossible that the poet in New Wye and the thug in New York awoke that morning at the same crushed beat of their Timekeeper’s stopwatch.

Knight seemed to him to be constantly playing some game of his own invention, without telling his partners its rules.