Quote

Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.

Vladimir Nabokov

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Hate
Norm
Unnaturally
Ends
Stopping
Avalanche
Feel
Village
Avalanches
Feels
Behave
Behaves
People
Harm
Jam
Track
Cheated
Feet
Tracks
Happy
Doom
Cowering

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Image
Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? Is that a crime? I countered, and they all laughed.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
...and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
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.
Vladimir Nabokov