More Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.
And the rest is rust and stardust.
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 am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
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.
