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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Vladimir Nabokov
Age: 77 †
Born: 1899
Born: January 1
Died: 1977
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Chess Composer
Chess Player
Journalist
Lepidopterist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
St. Petersburg
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Vladimir Sirin
Vl. Sirin
Wladimir Nabokoff-Sirin
V. Sirin
Perilous
Revelation
Revelations
Revolution

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name.
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Curiously enough, one cannot read a book one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.
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There was no Lo to behold.
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A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own.
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Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
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My characters are galley slaves.
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Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.
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I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
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I confess, I do not believe in time.
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There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
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My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
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I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.
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And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: O rainbow-colored gods. . .
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His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.
Vladimir Nabokov
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That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.
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Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
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The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
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How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
Vladimir Nabokov