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I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

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
Would
Expressed
Express
Expression
Known
Knowledge
Words
Littles
Little

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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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.
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Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
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I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.
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My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
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Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
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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.
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Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
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Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
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Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly .
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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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Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
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Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
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The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious it has been set free.
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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.
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Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
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By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
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If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
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Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
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The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
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