Quote

The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

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
Sorrow
Childhood
Lost
Sense
Years
Cherishing
Nostalgia
Cherish

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Image
Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious it has been set free.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Memory overshadows the present and dims the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup.
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
Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Here lies the sense of literary creation to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
...for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I confess, I do not believe in time.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.
Vladimir Nabokov