Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (born 22 April 1899, St. Petersburg, Russia – died 2 July 1977, Montreux, Switzerland), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Nabokov's best-known works in English include Lolita (1955), a notorious, boundary-defying novel about a middle aged man's affair with a 12-year-old girl, and the uniquely structured Pale Fire (1962). He was a seven-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.And the rest is rust and stardust.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
Vladimir Nabokov
I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes.Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.Our imagination flies — we are its shadow on the earth.He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.One is always at home in one's past...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.We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.See you soon my strange joy, my tender night.Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.
“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.”
Vladimir Nabokov
All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.
Vladimir Nabokov
…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.Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam.
I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.
Vladimir Nabokov
The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
Vladimir Nabokov
I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.
Vladimir Nabokov
Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.
Vladimir Nabokov
Most of all I want you to be happy, and it seems to me that I could give you that happiness — a sunny, simple happiness — and not an altogether common one…Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?I simply want to tell you that somehow I can’t imagine life without you…The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
Vladimir Nabokov
We all have such fateful objects — it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another — carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.
Vladimir Nabokov
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.If a violin string could ache, i would be that string.All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
