More Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed—then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.
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.
The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition
And the rest is rust and stardust.
