Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

The square root of I is I.

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

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

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

My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.

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

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

Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.

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

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

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

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

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

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

Let all of life be an unfettered howl.

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

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

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

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

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

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.

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

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

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

The future is but the obsolete in reverse.

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

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

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

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

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

Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!

Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

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