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I should allow only my heart to have imagination and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.

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
Allow
Personal
Rest
Memories
Imagination
Sunset
Truth
Drawn
Heart
Rely
Long
Memory

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Alas! In vain historians pry and probe: The same wind blows, and in the same live robe Truth bends her head to fingers curved cupwise And with a woman's smile and a child's care Examines something she is holding there Concealed by her own shoulder from our eyes.
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If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
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Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book great ideas are hogwash.
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It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
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Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac) and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as nymphets.
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the a.non.y.muse roller that passed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.
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Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
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I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
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Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
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There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
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I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
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And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.
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I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
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Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.
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I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
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Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
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Memory overshadows the present and dims the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup.
Vladimir Nabokov