Vladimir Nabokov

“...we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden.”

“for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.”

“…two lumpy old ladies in semitransparent raincoats, like potatoes in cellophane…”

“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.”

“The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglebooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody.”

“Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.”

“Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way.”

“We think not in words but in shadows of words.”

“Life is a message scribbled in the dark.”

“For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.”

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

“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.”

“Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.”

“If sex is the sermon made of art, love is the lady of that tower.”

“Caress the detail, the divine detail.”

“Estamos absurdamente acostumados ao milagre de que uns poucos sinais escritos são capazes de conter imagens imortais, espirais de pensamentos, novos mundos com pessoas vivas que falam, choram e riem. Aceitamos isso com tanta simplicidade que de certo modo, pelo próprio ato da aceitação insensível e rotineira, desfazemos a obra de todos os tempos, a história do desenvolvimento gradual da descrição e construção poéticas, do hominídeo a Browning, do troglodita a Keats. Que aconteceria se acordássemos um dia, todos nós, e descobríssemos que éramos totalmente incapazes de ler? Quero que vocês se maravilhem não apenas com o que lêem, mas com o milagre de que algo seja passível de ser lido.”

“Enchia-me o peito uma tempestade de soluços.”

“As palavras sem a experiência não teriam qualquer significado.”

“She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions.”

“Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun.”

“If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look.”

“O que me põe louco é a natureza dupla desta ninfeta - de todas as ninfetas, quiçá; esta mistura, na minha Lolita, de uma infantilidade terna e sonhadora com uma espécie de horripilante ordinarice, que provém das enfadonhas modelos fotográficas da publicidade e das revistas, com os seus narizinhos travessos...”

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

“I want you to leave your incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me.”

“Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care.”

“I felt my life needed a shake-up.”

“…my Lolita remarked: “You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own”; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions…”

“Tenho de reproduzir o impacto aquela visão instantânea por meio de uma sequência de palavras, mas seu acúmulo físico na página faz com que se perca a nitidez da percepção global. p. 112”

“realidade" (uma das poucas palavras que só fazem sentido entre aspas)”

“I don’t think in any language. I think in images. I don’t believe that people think in languages. They don’t move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all.”

“This, to use an American term in which discovery, retribution, torture, death, eternity appear in the shape of a singularly repulsive nutshell, was it.”

“This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends ’ and ‘schools ’ and ‘myths ’ and ‘symbols ’ and ‘social comment ’ and something unspeakably spooky called ‘climate of thought.’ Actually these ‘serious’ courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books.”

“One last word are you quite quite ure that - well not tomorrow of course and not after tomorrow but - well - some day any day you will not come to live with me I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries if you give me that microscopic hope.”

“No you can't take a pistol and plug a girl you don't even know simply because she attracts you.”

“It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.”

“Ho notato spesso che siamo inclini a dotare i nostri amici della stabilità tipologica che nella mente del lettore acquistano i personaggi letterari. Per quante volte possiamo riaprire Re Lear, non troveremo mai il buon re che fa gazzarra e picchia il boccale sul tavolo, dimentico di tutte le sue pene, durante un'allegra riunione con tutte e tre le figlie e i loro cani da compagnia. Mai Emma si riavrà, animata dai sali soccorrevoli contenuti nella tempestiva lacrima del padre di Flaubert. Qualunque sia stata l'evoluzione di questo o quel popolare personaggio fra la prima di e la quarta di copertina, il suo fato si è fissato nella nostra mente, e allo stesso modo ci aspettiamo che i nostri amici seguano questo o quello schema logico e convenzionale che noi abbiamo fissato per loro. Così X non comporrà mai la musica immortale che stonerebbe con le mediocri sinfonie alle quali ci ha abituato. Y non commetterà mai un omicidio. In nessuna circostanza Z potrà tradirci. Una volta predisposto tutto nella nostra mente, quanto più di rado vediamo una particolare persona, tanto più ci dà soddisfazione verificare con quale obbedienza essa si conformi, ogni volta che ci giungono sue notizie, all'idea che abbiamo di lei. Ogni diversione nei fatti che abbiamo stabilito ci sembrerebbe non solo anomala, ma addirittura immorale. Preferiremmo non aver mai conosciuto il nostro vicino, il venditore di hot-dog in pensione, se dovesse saltar fuori che ha appena pubblicato il più grande libro di poesia della sua epoca.”

“You see, we find comfort in telling ourselves that the world could not exist without us, that it exists only inasmuch as we ourselves exist, inasmuch as we can represent it to ourselves. Death, infinite space, galaxies, all this is frightening, exactly because it transcends the limits of our perception.”

“Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.”

“The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison.”

“In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel—and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride.”

“I loathe popular pulp, I loathe go-go gangs, I loathe jungle music, I loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories. I especially loathe vulgar movies—cripples raping nuns under tables, or naked-girl breasts squeezing against the tanned torsos of repulsive young males. And, really, I don't think I mock popular trash more often than do other authors who believe with me that a good laugh is the best pesticide.”

“Drug addicts, especially young ones, are conformists flocking together in sticky groups, and I do not write for groups, nor approve of group therapy (the big scene in the Freudian farce); as I have said often enough, I write for myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts. Young dunces who turn to drugs cannot read “Lolita,” or any of my books, some in fact cannot read at all. Let me also observe that the term “square” already dates as a slang word, for nothing dates quicker than conservative youth, nor is there anything more philistine, more bourgeois, more ovine than this business of drug duncery. Half a century ago, a similar fashion among the smart set of St. Petersburg was cocaine sniffing combined with phony orientalities. The better and brighter minds of my young American readers are far removed from those juvenile fads and faddists. I also used to know in the past a Communist agent who got so involved in trying to wreck anti-Bolshevist groups by distributing drugs among them that he became an addict himself and lapsed into a dreamy state of commendable metempsychic sloth. He must be grazing today on some grassy slope in Tibet if he has not yet lined the coat of his fortunate shepherd.”

“Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as “great literature” by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced Dr. Schweitzer in some homes.”

“A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young. I remember how once, between terms, not at Cornell, a student brought a transistor set with him into the reading room. He managed to state that one, he was playing “classical” music; that two, he was doing it “softly”; and that three, “there were not many readers around in summer.” I was there, a one-man multitude.”

“Dostoevski's The Double is his best work though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's "Nose.”

“Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita.”

“Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.”

“My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on "ideas." Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your ownfootprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the "how" above the "what" but do not let it be confused with the "so what." Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent.”

“Grēks, kuru es senāk auklēju samudžinātās sirds stīgās, mon grand peche radieux, ir saplacis līdz savai būtībai: līdz neauglīgam un egoistiskam netikumam; un tieši to es svītroju laukā un nolādu. Jūs varat zoboties par mani un piedraudēt atbrīvot tiesas zāli, bet, kamēr man mutē neiebāzīs sprūdu un nenoslāpēs mani, es kliegtin kliegšu par savu nabaga taisnību. Briesmīgi vēlos, lai visa pasaule uzzinātu, cik ļoti es mīlu savu Lolitu, šo Lolitu, bālu un aptraipītu, ar svešu bērnu zem sirds, bet vēl arvien pelēkām acīm, arvien krāsotām skropstām, arvien vēl gaišmatainu un salkani smaidošu, arvien vēl Karmensitu, arvien vēl manu, manu… Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part ou nous ne serons jamais separes.”

“IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT SCENES ONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE FILMEDShakespeare 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.”