942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Or is this all but obsolete romantic rot, Cincinnatus?

And yet I am happy. Yes, happy. I swear. I swear that I am happy...What does it matter that I am a bit cheap, a bit foul, and that no one appreciates all the remarkable things about me—my fantasy, my erudition, my literary gift…I am happy that I can gaze at myself, for any man is absorbing—yes, really absorbing! ... I am happy—yes, happy!

A horsefly applied itself, blind fool, to Pnin's bald head, and was stunned by a smack of his meaty palm.

In life, as in chess, it is always better to analyze one's motives and intentions.

У нас есть шахматы с собой,Шекспир и Пушкин, с нас довольно.

...really, what a strange man he is, thought klara, with that aching feeling of loneliness which always overcomes us when someone dear to us surrenders to a daydream in which we have no place.

[D]avid began to argue, with the whining intonations of German astonishment, [...] that everyone did it.

Finally it gave up- as some day life will give up- bothering me.

The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole with greater or lesser distinction (like the swell and fall of uneven breathing), now rolling up this image, now that, letting it ride in the wind, or even tossing it out on the shore, where it seems to move and live for a minute on its own and presently is drawn back again by grey seas where it sinks or is strangely transfigured.