Quote

I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.

Vladimir Nabokov

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Life
Passes
Dregs
People
Nightmare
Delirium
Dreams
Senseless
Vision
Nightmares
Sort
Visions
Dream
Torment
Everything
Wretched
Specters
Real
Surrounded
Drivel

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Image
All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
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 .
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
The lost glove is happy.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
We are most artistically caged.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Don't touch me I'll die if you touch me.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
A good laugh is the best pesticide.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended the destinies of the quick.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
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