942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up.

The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy.

His brown eyes would roam around the various sentimental and artistic bric-a-brac present, and his own banal toiles (the conventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars, blue nipples and geometrical designs of the day), and with a vague gesture toward a painted wooden bowl or veined vase, he would say "Prenez donc une des ces poires. La bonne dame d'en face m'en offre plus que je n'en peux savourer." Or: "Mississe Taille Lore vient de me donner ces dahlias, belles fleurs que j'exècre.

Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?

When I hear a critic speaking of an author’s sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool

The only consciousness that persists in the hereafter is the consciousness of pain.

I can only explain my behaviour then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind.

I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash.

Then Van and Ada met in the passage, and would have kissed at some earlier stage of the Novel's Evolution in the History of Literature.