Vladimir Nabokov Quotes - Page 8

A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.

I think it is all a matter of love.

Her lips were like large crimson polyps.

I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust

My answer to your question'Does the writer have a social responsibility?' is NO.You owe me ten cents, sir.

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.

You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: "O rainbow-colored gods. . .

Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.

Memory overshadows the present and dims the future "into something thicker than its usual pea soup."

I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.

And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.

I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.

You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.

And what is death, if not a face at peace - its artistic perfection.

I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.