Vladimir Nabokov quotes - page 2

Solitude is the playfield of Satan. (Vladimir Nabokov)
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
One is always at home in one's past... View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
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. (Vladimir Nabokov)
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
I'm thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art, And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
And the rest is rust and stardust. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
He broke my heart. You merely broke my life. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Words without experience are meaningless. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms, she was always Lolita. (Vladimir Nabokov)
I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
But in my arms she was always Lolita. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov