More Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition
Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
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.
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
We think not in words but in shadows of words.
