More Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.
Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
Words without experience are meaningless.
Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.
...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.
Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
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.
