Quote

What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidts the night of non-being.

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
Night
Marvel
Life
Surprises
Sudden
Landscape
Surprise
Window
Consciousness
Sunlit
Open
Swinging

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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I confess, I do not believe in time.
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Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
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There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
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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.
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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
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The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.
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There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called powerful novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.
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I don't think in any language. I think in images.
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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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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Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.
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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.
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A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
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The square root of I is I.
Vladimir Nabokov
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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
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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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Life with you was lovely—and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink ‘v’ in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering ‘l.’ Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too.
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov