942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Most of the dandelions had changed from suns into moons.

A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.

The cup-sized breasts of that twenty-four year old impatient beauty seemed a dozen years younger than she, with those pale squinty nipples and firm form.

Moj posao je čokolada. Čokolada je dobra stvar. Ima curica koje vole samo gorku... probirljiva mala prenemagala. (Ne razumem zašto ovo pišem).

The melacholy and the tenderness of mortal life; the passion and the pain;The claret tailight of that dwindling planeOff Hesperus; your gesture dismayOn running out of cigarettes; the way You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slimeSnails leave or flagstone; this good ink, this rhyme.This index card, this slender rubber bandWhich always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,Are found in Heaven by the newlydeadStored in its strongholds through the years.

We must thank fate (and the author’s thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then he would have been lost. When I want a good nightmare I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume of Dikanka and Mirgorod stuff about ghosts haunting the banks of the Dniepr, burlesque Jews and dashing Cossacks.

Tropes are the dreams of speech.

Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day which I first knew with certainty that the red convertible was following us.

Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.