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It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.

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
Grow
Darkens
Strange
Suspiciously
Mishaps
Memories
Prettier
Grows
Frame
Age
Memory
Figure
Cherub
Figures
Cherubs

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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 mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
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My characters are galley slaves.
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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.
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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.
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Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.
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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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I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
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I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.
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Her lips were like large crimson polyps.
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Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
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By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
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I don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.
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Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
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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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if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
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Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.
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