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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

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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
Achievement
Wandering
Memory
Folds
Memories
Innate
Pleasure
Gathering
Use
Wander
Masterly
Makes
Witness
Harmonies
Past
Supreme
Fold
Harmony
Suspended

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Words without experience are meaningless.
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Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile.
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Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
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Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
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To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena - all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.
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She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
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Don't touch me I'll die if you touch me.
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A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
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I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
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Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.
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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
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...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.
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Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
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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
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The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
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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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All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
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...and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights.
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He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.
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