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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

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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
Individual
Cosmos
Human
Comparison
Humans
Expression
Pouch
Would
Hold
Kangaroo
Single
Kangaroos
Consciousness
Paltry
Small
Puny
Words
Recollection

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Although I do not care for the slogan art for art's sake, there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.
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Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
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We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
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I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
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No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.
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Her lips were like large crimson polyps.
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Freudism and all it has tainted with its grotesque implications and methods, appear to me to be one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others. I reject it utterly, along with a few other medieval items still adored by the ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick.
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It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
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My Carmen, I said (I used to call her that sometimes) we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed. ... Because, really, I continued, there is no point in staying here. There is no point in staying anywhere, said Lolita.
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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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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.
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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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I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
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One is always at home in one's past.
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I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
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He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
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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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The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
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Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.
Vladimir Nabokov