Quote

Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!

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
Moving
Sees
Beautiful
Enormous
Gigantic
Today
Shadow
Afar
Everything
Blue
Recognizes
Men
Listen
Joyful
World
Move
Shadows
Either
Seldom
Beauty
Gods

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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.
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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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I don't think in any language. I think in images.
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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
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When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - hoping that I like the book as much as he does - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.
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I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.
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I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust
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Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
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And yet I am happy. Yes, happy. I swear. I swear that I am happy...What does it matter that I am a bit cheap, a bit foul, and that no one appreciates all the remarkable things about me-my fantasy, my erudition, my literary gift...I am happy that I can gaze at myself, for any man is absorbing-yes, really absorbing! ... I am happy-yes, happy!
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I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
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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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Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.
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... my mind lay limp in an empty world.
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Look at this tangle of thorns.
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I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov