The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

“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, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“It was love at first touch rather than at first sight, for I had met her several times before without experiencing any special emotions; but one night as I was seeing her home, something quaint she had said made me stoop with a laugh and lightly kiss her on the hair - and of course we all know of that blinding blast which is caused by merely picking up a small doll from the floor of a carefully abandoned house: the soldier involved hears nothing; for him it is but an ecstatic soundless and boundless expansion of what had been during his life a pinpoint of light in the dark center of his being. And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion'

The time, the place, the torture. Her fan, her gloves, her mask. I spent that night and many others getting it out of her bit by bit, but not getting it all. I was under the strange delusion that first I must find out every detail, reconstruct every minute, and only then decide whether I could bear it. But the limit of desired knowledge was unattainable, nor could I ever foretell the approximate point after which I might imagine myself satiated, because of course the denominator of every fraction of knowledge was potentially as infinite as the number of intervals between the fractions themselves.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Collected Stories

“You see, we find comfort in telling ourselves that the world could not exist without us, that it exists only inasmuch as we ourselves exist, inasmuch as we can represent it to ourselves. Death, infinite space, galaxies, all this is frightening, exactly because it transcends the limits of our perception.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“When you laugh, I want to transform the
entire world so it will mirror you.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: "O rainbow-colored gods. . .”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“Actually he was a pessimist, and, like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“Your silence was effortless and windless, like the silence of clouds or plants. All silence is the recognition of a mystery. There was much about you that seemed mysterious. A”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“I had once been splintered into a million beings and objects. Today I am one, tomorrow I shall splinter again. And thus everything in the world decants and modulates. That day I was on the crest of a wave. I knew that all my surroundings were notes of one and the same harmony, knew - secretly - the source and the inevitable resolution of the sounds assembled for an instant, and the new chord that would be engendered by each of the dispersing notes. My soul's musical ear knew and comprehended everything.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“The lovely thing about humanity is that at times one may be unaware of doing right, but one is always aware of doing wrong.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“A wave would arrive, all out of breath, but, as it had nothing to report, it would disperse in apologetic salaams.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“Your voice, through the beelike hum, was remote and anxious. It kept sliding into the distance and vanishing. I spoke to you with tightly shut eyes, and felt like crying. My love for you was the throbbing, welling warmth of tears. That is exactly how I imagined paradise: silence and tears, and the warm silk of your knees. This you could not comprehend.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“My angel, oh my angel, perhaps our whole earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like "dental" and "transcendental" (remember?), and the true meaning of reality, of that piercing term, purged of all our strange, dreamy, masquerade interpretations, now sounds so pure and sweet that you, angel, find it amusing that we could have taken the dream so seriously (although you and I did have an inkling of why everything disintegrated at one furtive touch-- words, conventions of everyday life, systems, persons-- so, you know, I think laughter is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“When a hypothesis enters a scientist's mind, he checks it by calculation and experiment, that is, by the mimicry and the pantomime of truth. It's plausibility infects others, and the hypothesis is accepted as the true explanation for the given phenomenon, until someone finds its faults.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“[D]avid began to argue, with the whining intonations of German astonishment, [...] that everyone did it.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer... I would rather not dwell upon him at all, but I cannot help it— he is surging up from under my pen. Today one does not hear much about him; and this is good, for it proves that I was right in resisting his evil spell, right in experiencing a creepy chill down my spine whenever this or that new book of his touched my hand. The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates. Lean and arrogant, with some poisonous pun ever ready to fork out and quiver at you, and with a strange look of expectancy in his dull brown veiled eyes, this false wag had, I daresay, an irresistible effect on small rodents. Having mastered the art of verbal invention to perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words, a title he valued higher than that of a writer; personally, I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other; and I remember once saying to him as I braved the mockery of his encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth.

I had known his books before I knew him; a faint disgust was already replacing the aesthetic pleasure which I had suffered his first novel to give me. At the beginning of his career, it had been possible perhaps to distinguish some human landscape, some old garden, some dream- familiar disposition of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose... but with every new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more ominous; and today one can no longer see anything at all through that blazoned, ghastly rich glass, and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but a perfectly black void would face one’s shivering soul. But how dangerous he was in his prime, what venom he squirted, with what whips he lashed when provoked! The tornado of his passing satire left a barren waste where felled oaks lay in a row, and the dust still twisted, and the unfortunate author of some adverse review, howling with pain, spun like a top in the dust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“There was a rhythm, an
alternation in the dripping that I found as teasing as a coin
trick.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“Logical reasoning may be a most convenient means of mental communication for covering short distances, but the curvature of the earth, alas, is reflected even in logic: an ideally rational progression of thought will finally bring you back to the point of departure where you return aware of the simplicity of genius, with a delightful sensation that you have embraced truth, while actually you have merely embraced your own self... anything you might term a deduction already exposes the flaw: logical development inexorably becomes an envelopment.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“How can I demonstrate [...] that I have glimpsed somebody's future recollection?”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“The distinct feature of everything extant is its monotony.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“Su muerte me salvó de la locura. El dolor humano, puro y simple, llenó mi vida tan completamente que no había lugar para ninguna otra emoción. Pero el tiempo pasa, y su imagen se vuelve cada vez más perfecta dentro de mí, cada vez menos viva. Los detalles del pasado, los pequeños recuerdos vitales, se van desvaneciendo imperceptiblemente, desaparecen uno a uno, o de dos en dos, de la misma forma que se van apagando las luces, ahora aquí, ahora allá, en las ventanas de una casa cuyos habitantes se van quedando dormidos. Y sé que mi cerebro está condenado, que el terror que experimente en una ocasión, el impotente miedo a la existencia, se apoderará de mí una vez más, y que entonces ya no habrá salvación.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“[T]he forget-me-not gray of an eye squinting at an incipient kiss, the placid expression of your ears when you would lift up your hair … how can I reconcile myself to your disappearance, to this gaping hole, into which slides everything—my whole life, wet gravel, objects, and habits—and what tombal railings can prevent me from tumbling, with silent relish, into this abyss? Vertigo of the soul.

from “Ultima Thule”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“The worst madman is the one who fails to consider the possibility of somebody else being mad too.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider’s web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist. She accompanied him: her little boots stepped rapidly, and her hands never stopped moving, moving—to pluck a leaf from a bush or stroke a rock wall in passing—light, laughing hands that knew no repose. He saw her small face with its dense dark freckles, and her wide eyes, whose pale greenish hue was that of the shards of glass licked smooth by the sea waves.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“No wonder tobacco shops have a predilection for corners, for”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Collected Stories

“Thus a man looking through a tremendous telescope does not see the cirri of an Indian summer above his charmed orchard, but does see, as my regretted colleague, the late Professor Alexander Ivanchenko, twice saw, the swarming of hesperozoa in a humid valley of the planet Venus.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

“Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov