Quote

... my mind lay limp in an empty world.

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
Depression
Lays
Empty
Mind
World
Limp

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Image
Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Literature was not born the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Although I do not care for the slogan art for art's sake, there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I confess, I do not believe in time.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Of all my Russian books, the defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract Chess is supposed to be
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
Vladimir Nabokov