942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Dimly, I recall running up to his chair to show him a pretty pebble, which he slowly examined and then slowly put into his mouth.

To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms – some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh.

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.

He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire.

Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her.

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.

She entered his life without knocking, as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague resemblance to one’s own. She stayed there forgetting the way out and quietly getting used to the strange creatures she found there.

Everything was too quiet to be natural. It seemed as if the silence was rising, rising – would suddenly brim over and break into laughter.

Van was positive that not once during a month of love-making had he failed to take all necessary precautions, sometimes rather bizarre, but incontestably trustworthy, and had lately acquired a sheath-like contraceptive device that in Ladore county only barbershops, for some odd but ancient reason, were allowed to sell.