942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

No free man needs a God; but was I free?

All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.

I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.

And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower.

Only experts, for experts, should probe a mind’s misery.

In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel – and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride.

One is always at home in one’s past...

In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

Here speaks Professor – ′ There followed a preposterous little explosion. ‘I conduct the classes in Russian. Mrs Fire, who is now working at the library part-time –.