942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness – that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidts the night of non-being.

No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He.

Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels.

Where, where... ” M’sieur Pierre mimicked him. “You know where. Off to do chop-chop.

It stood to reason that if the evil designer – the destroyer of minds, the friend of fever – had concealed the key of the pattern with such monstrous care, that key must be as precious as life itself and, when found, would regain for Timofey Pnin his everyday health, his everyday world.

To the Winds, Victor was a problem child insofar as he refused to be one.

Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought – and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.

There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.

The sense of literary creation is to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.