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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

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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
Well
Luxury
Great
Sentences
Hour
Dies
Hours
Compensation
Knowledge
Earned
Death
Exact
Wells
Sentence

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The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
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Curiously enough, one cannot read a book one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.
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To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
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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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My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
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Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.
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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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I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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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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Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
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All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
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At a very early stage of the novel's development I get this urge to collect bits of straw and fluff, and to eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it.
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Dear Jesus, do something.
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And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: O rainbow-colored gods. . .
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The square root of I is I.
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A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
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