"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes"
— Vladimir Nabokov

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life. "
— Vladimir Nabokov

"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

"Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Pnin)

"Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece"
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"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."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you--on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck--even then. And afterwards--perhaps most of all afterwards--I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B...without looking, or, without lifting the pencil...or in some other way...we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Invitation to a Beheading)

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible"
— Vladimir Nabokov

"And the rest is rust and stardust."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Dear Jesus, do something."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)

"Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited)

"We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lectures on Literature)

"I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person, the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We could prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form."
— Vladimir Nabokov

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

"He broke my heart. You merely broke my life."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski; some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
'You know what's so dreadful about dying is that you're completely on your own'; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions..."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Bend Sinister)

"Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"you have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs--the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limbs, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate--the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle..."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise - a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames - but still a paradise. "
— Vladimir Nabokov

"I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction...For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece. "
— Vladimir Nabokov

"When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?"
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs. "
— Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)

"And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"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."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst. "
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar."
— Vladimir Nabokov (The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov)