Quote collection
364 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT SCENES ONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE FILMED Shakespeare in the part of the King's Ghost. The beheading of Louis the Sixteenth, the drums drowning his speech on the scaffold. Herman Melville at breakfast, feeling a sardine to his cat. Poe's wedding. Lewis Carroll's picnics. The Russians leaving Alaska, delighted with the deal. Shot of a seal applauding."
"We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless."
"Solitude is the playfield of Satan."
"Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile."
"Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath."
"Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution."
"... my mind lay limp in an empty world."
"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."
"It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory."
"By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast."
"Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark."
"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."
"The future is but the obsolete in reverse."
"I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But, probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clapsed her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured: 'Oh, Hermann...." It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe."
"And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears."
"Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist."
"My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God; but was I free?"
"As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage."
"A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection."