"I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly."
Read quote
10 likes
Quote collection
Vladimir Nabokov quotes (page 7 of 19)
364 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog."
Read quote
10 likes
"Life with you was lovely—and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink ‘v’ in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering ‘l.’ Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too."
Read quote
10 likes
"But that mimosa grove-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another."
Read quote
10 likes
"I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise."
Read quote
9 likes
"Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names."
Read quote
9 likes
"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."
Read quote
9 likes
"Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!"
Read quote
9 likes
"Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish."
Read quote
9 likes
"Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth."
Read quote
9 likes
"I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling"
Read quote
9 likes
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."
Read quote
9 likes
"I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life."
Read quote
9 likes
"I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst."
Read quote
8 likes
"My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French."
Read quote
8 likes
"Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences."
Read quote
8 likes
"Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring."
Read quote
8 likes
"Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling."
Read quote
8 likes
"I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all."
Read quote
8 likes
"I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny."
Read quote
8 likes