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Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

Total quotes: 42
“I simply want to tell you that somehow I can’t imagine life without you. I love you, I want you, I need you unbearably.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Vladimir + Vera, Love Quotes For Her, Desire
“You turn my life into something light, amazing, rainbowed— you put a glint of happiness on everything.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Love, romance, Perfect Lines, Love In One Sentence
“The calendar says I had known him only for a few months but there exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time, independent of rotating, malicious music.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (Vintage International)
Tagged: Friendship, Time Warps, Time, Subjective Time
“The first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile.”
— Vladimir Nabokov,
Tagged: Time, History, Smile, Smiles
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita(Vintage International)
Tagged: first lines of books, Alliteration Examples
“See you soon my strange joy, my tender night.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Vladimir + Vera
“It is astounding how little the ordinary person notices butterflies.”
— Vladimir Nabokov,
Tagged: Butterflies, The Beauty Flies By, Seeing Seeing
“And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night— every night, every night— the moment I feigned sleep.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Vintage International)
Tagged: Love, Life, travel, Sadness, one perfect sentence, 107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature, Perfect Sentences
“Her gaiety, too, was like her mother's—a singular unobtrusive gaiety. It was just a quiet delight in one's own existence with a faint note of humorous surprise at being alive at all—yes, that was the tenor of it: mortal gaiety.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Tagged: Lack of Gravity, Mortal Gaiety, Simple
“I absolutely cannot be any longer without you — this half-existence, quarter-existence — is starting to get too much for me — and without the air which comes from you I can neither think nor write— I can’t do anything.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Tumblr Quotes
Tagged: ThoughtCatalogTumblr
“I dreamt of you last night – as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Vladimir + Vera
“She was a clinging little soul, docile and gentle. Her love was of the lily variety; but now and then it burst into flame and at such times Albinus was deluded into thinking that he had no need of any other love-mate.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Tagged: Love, Love Delusions
“I asked for another, more elaborate, assignment later the same evening, and she said she would meet me at the corner café at nine, and swore she had never posé un lapin in all her young life.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Vintage International)
Tagged: KindlePasting
“In the dining room, my brother and I would be told to go on with our food.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (Vintage International)
Tagged: KindlePasting
“All of this is as unsure as writing on water, but water with the azure of reflected possibilities.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Uncertainty, Azure
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
— Vladimir Nabokov,
Tagged: first lines of books, Abyss, Meaning Of Life
“You came into my life — not as one comes to visit … but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Vladimir + Vera
“And do you recall the thunderstorms of our childhood? Frightful thunder over the verandah — and at once the most azure aftermath and on everything: diamonds?”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Thunderstroms, Azure, Blue
“I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Tagged: Passion, Flash, Meeting Someone, When Words Fail
“I love you, my sun, my life, I love your eyes — closed — all the little tails of your thoughts, your stretchy vowels, your whole soul from head to heels.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Vladimir + Vera
“Every limit presupposes something beyond it — hence the neutral illumination.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Tagged: Beyond, Key Confirms The Prison, Lightness, Limits, Leave Society, Bringing The High Low, Boundary Breaks
“It comes out thus — follow me, Tremens: space is God, and matter is Christ, and time is the Holy Ghost.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Three Is The Number, Secularized Theology
“I want you to be happy, and it seems to me that I could give you that happiness — a sunny, simple happiness — and not an altogether common one.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Vladimir + Vera
“Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (Vintage International)
Tagged: Azure, The Color of Letters, What Color Is Q?, What Color Is K?, Literary Synesthesia
“I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Tagged: Death, Identity, Water, anxiety in literature, what anxiety feels like
“Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Tagged: Cheating, Diaster, first lines of books
“But it’s not bedtime yet. The sun attains”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (Vintage International)
Tagged: KindlePasting
“I swear — and the inkblot has nothing to do with it — I swear by all that’s dear to me, all I believe in — I swear that I have never loved before as I love you, — with such tenderness — to the point of tears — and with such a sense of radiance.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Vladimir + Vera
“I won’t hide it: I’m so unused to being — well, understood, perhaps, — so unused to it, that in the very first minutes of our meeting I thought: this is a joke… But then… And there are things that are hard to talk about — you’ll rub off their marvelous pollen at the touch of a word… You are lovely…”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Vladimir + Vera
“Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Vintage International)
Tagged: Never Die
“For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Tagged: fiction, Create Realms
“It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love you – and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created – out of five vowels and three consonants.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Vladimir + Vera
“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.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Vladimir + Vera
“This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Tagged: Condensed, Details, No Point So What, We Might As Well
“It really was blue: purple-blue in the distance, peacock-blue coming nearer, diamond-blue where the wave caught the light. The foam toppled over, ran, slowed down, then receded, leaving a smooth mirror on the wet sand, which the next wave flooded again.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Tagged: Descriptions of the Ocean, Ocean, Sea, The Beach, Water
“I am furious with you, but I love you very dearly.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Love
“I must keep quiet for a little space and then walk very slowly along that bright sand of pain, toward that blue, blue wave. What bliss there is in blueness. I never knew how blue blueness could be. What a mess life has been. Now I know everything. Coming, coming, coming to drown me. There it is. How it hurts. I can't breathe.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Tagged: Blue, Colors, Dying, To Die, Things People Say In Books When They Are Dying, What It Feels Like To Die, Descriptions Of What It Feels Like To Die From Literature
“After those paroxysms of deadly horror, when he had howled, flung himself about and tried frantically to tear something away from his eyes, he lapsed into a state of semi-consciousness. Then presently there would loom up once more that unbearable mountain of oppression, which was only comparable with the panic of one who wakes to find himself in his grave.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark (Vintage International)
Tagged: anxiety in literature, what anxiety feels like, Horror, Fear
“'So much the better,' thought Margot, and suddenly she felt extremely elated. When she had sent off the letter she had anticipated a far more trivial consequence: he refuses to show it, wife gets wild, stamps, has a fit. So the first suspicions are roused and that eases the way. But now chance had helped her and the way was made clear at one stroke. She let the book slip to the floor and smiled as she looked at his downcast twitching face. It was time to act, she supposed. Margot stretched herself out, was aware of a pleasant tingling in her slim body and said, gazing up at the ceiling, 'Come here.' He came, sat down on the edge of the couch and shook his head despondently. 'Kiss me,' she said, closing her eyes. 'I'll comfort you.'”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
Tagged: Machiavellian Machinations, Overwhelmed
“When I was seventeen, I used to write on average two poems a day, each of them taking me about twenty minutes. Their quality was doubtful, but I didn’t even try to write better then, thinking that I was performing little miracles and that over miracles I didn’t need to think. Now I know that, indeed, reason is a negative part of creativity and inspiration a positive one, but only through their secret conjunction is the white spark born, the electrical flicker of perfect creation.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
Tagged: Aging, Youth, Reason
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