942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

We all have such fateful objects — it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another — carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.

A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.

We must assume, I think, thatthe forward projection of what imagination he had, stopped at the act, on the brink ofall its possible consequences; ghost consequences, comparable to the ghost toes of anamputee or to the fanning out of additional squares which a chess knight (that skips-pace piece), standing on a marginal file, "feels" in phantom extensions beyond theboard, but which have no effect whatever on his real moves, on the real play.

We must assume, I think, that the forward projection of what imagination he had, stopped at the act, on the brink of all its possible consequences; ghost consequences, comparable to the ghost toes of an amputee or to the fanning out of additional squares which a chess knight (that skipspace piece), standing on a marginal file, "feels" in phantom extensions beyond the board, but which have no effect whatever on his real moves, on the real play.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

For as we know from dreams it is so hardTo speak to our dear dead! They disregardOur apprehension, queaziness and shame - The awful sense that they're not quite the same.

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