Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”

“I think it is all a matter of love the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes ”

“Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.”

“No free man needs a God; but was I free?How fully I felt nature glued to meAnd how my childish palate loved the tasteHalf-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!My picture book was at an early ageT...”

“Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.”

“I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barredI would gather her in my arm...”

“Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”

“He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.”

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”

“Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.”

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl.”

“Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.”

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

“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 Jo...”

“To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms -- some careles...”

“The square root of I is I.”

“All religions are based on obsolete terminology.”

“You have to be an artist and a madman...”

“Light in comparison with darkness is a void.”

“We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.”