942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

I think it is all a matter of love...

The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.

Solitude was corrupting me.

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.

The future is but the obsolete in reverse.

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

...for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.

...If he failed the first time he took his driver's licence test, it was mainly because he started an argument with the examiner in an ill-timed effort to prove that nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled. He was more circumspect the next time, and passed...