More Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
Words without experience are meaningless.
Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
