More Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
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.
Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.
The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
