Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.”

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”

“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”

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

“I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.”

“I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.”

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.”

“I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust.”

“If a violin string could ache, i would be that string.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.”

“Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep.”

“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.”

“We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.”

“Words without experience are meaningless.”

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

“You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs ― the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limbs, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate ― the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”

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

“You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”