Quote

Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.

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
Smoke
Throw
Archangel
Angel
Cigarettes
Stars
Sleeves
Comes
Cigarette
Away
Hiding
Sometimes
Angels
Mind
Shooting

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Image
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.
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
Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
In reading, one should notice and fondle details.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
We are most artistically caged.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist.
Vladimir Nabokov