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

"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)

"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

"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

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

"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)

"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)

"Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle."
— Vladimir Nabokov

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

"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

"Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a "tower," or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a "bridge." "Real towers" and "real bridges" were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral "thing" might look or even actually become "real" or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid "fog." When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with "ruined towers" and "broken bridges.""
— Vladimir Nabokov (Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle)

"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)

"beware of ideas..."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"My little cup brims with tiddles."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Van sealed the letter, found his Thunderbolt pistol in the place he had visualized, introduced one cartridge into the magazine, and translated it into its chamber. Then, standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened - or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the fakes serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"We are most artistically caged."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)

"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

"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

"Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar .... Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!"
— Vladimir Nabokov (Strong Opinions)

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
— Douglas Adams

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
— Douglas Adams

"Don't Panic"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"The problem with designing something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of a complete fool. "
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all."
— Douglas Adams

"First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure."
— Douglas Adams

"Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I'm afraid where you begin to suspect that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending yet another ten million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"It can hardly be a coincindence that no language on earth has ever produced the expession "As pretty as an airport." "
— Douglas Adams (The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul)

"What I need... is a strong drink and a peer group."
— Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe and Everything)

"My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.

This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

However, this is not relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the Branwell Brontë piece of information concerns writers and feeling like death and doing things to prove they can be done, all of which are pertinent to my current situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky."
— Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time)

"I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed."
— Douglas Adams

"There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again."
— Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time)

"The impossible often has a kind of integrity the merely improbable lacks."
— Douglas Adams

"Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!"
— Douglas Adams

"Life is wasted on the living."
— Douglas Adams

"-and we’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere…and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together guys.-Galaxy Radio"
— Douglas Adams

"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armor to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place."
— Douglas Adams

""42 is a nice number that you can take home and introduce to your family" "
— Douglas Adams

"The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired someone to pick up the socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the place down. Michelangelo would have been distressed by its proportions, which were neither lofty nor shaped by any noticeable inner harmony or symmetry, other than that all parts of the room were pretty much equally full of old coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays, most of which were sharing their tasks with each other. The walls were painted in almost precisely that shade of green which Rafaello Sanzio would have bitten off his own right hand at the wrist rather than use, and Hercules, on seeing the room, would probably have returned half an hour later armed with a navigable river."
— Douglas Adams (The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul)

"What is this? Some sort of galactic hyperhearse?"
— Douglas Adams

"[...] during this century (the twentieth) we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport - the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn't need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don't (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show "normal" mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. 'Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn't do anything? Didn't everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?'

'Yes, child, that's why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.'

'What was the Restoration again, please, miss?'

'The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.'"
— Douglas Adams

"I'd far rather be happy than right any day "
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."
"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Carry On, Jeeves)

"In a series of events, all of which had been a bit thick, this, in his opinion, achieved the maximum of thickness."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"...it has been well said that it is precisely these moments when we are feeling that ours is the world and everything that's in it that Fate selects for sneaking up on us with the rock in the stocking."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"A certain critic -- for such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Summer Moonshine)

"A man who has spent most of his adult life trying out a series of patent medicines is always an optimist."
— P.G. Wodehouse (The Most Of P.G. Wodehouse)