942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Readers are born free and ought to remain free.

And presently I was shaking hands with both of them in the street, the sloping street, and everything was whirling and flying before the approaching white deluge, and a truck with a mattress from Philadelphia was confidently rolling down to an empty house, and dust was running and writhing over the exact slab of stone where Charlotte, when they lifted the laprobe for me, had been revealed, curled up, her eyes intact, their black lashes still wet, matted, like yours, Lolita.

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three

When you read Turgenev, you know you are reading Turgenev. When you read Tolstoy, you read just because you cannot stop.

Tolstoy's prose keeps pace with our pulses, his characters seem to move with the same swing as the people passing under our window while we sit reading his book.

Readers call Tolstoy a giant not because other writers are dwarfs but because he remains always of exactly our own stature,† exactly keeping pace with us instead of passing by in the distance, as other authors do.

It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love you – and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created – out of five vowels and three consonants.

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.

My little cup brims with tiddles.