Vladimir Nabokov Quotes, Thoughts and images

Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.

Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.

The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition.

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

Which arrow flies forever? The arrow that has hit its mark.

The future is but the obsolete in reverse.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.

I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.

My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.

Let all of life be an unfettered howl.

His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

I don't think in any language. I think in images.

There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.

I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.

Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.

I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.

The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.

My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.

The square root of I is I.