Quote

There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me.

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
Nothing
Alone
Great
Books
Demented
Every
Known
Suspected
Time
Death
Conspiracy
People
Truth
Somehow
Human
Survival
Humans
Youth
Book
Knew

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.
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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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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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Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
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...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
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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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We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
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The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.
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I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.
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But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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Words without experience are meaningless.
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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.
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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
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Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk.
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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.
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