Welcome, literary aficionados and quote collectors alike, to our enchanting journey through the literary universe of Vladimir Nabokov. Buckle up as we navigate through “50 Lyrical Vladimir Nabokov Quotes,” a collection that perfectly encapsulates the piercing insights, exquisite metaphors, and labyrinthine wordplay that made Nabokov a giant of 20th century literature. Are you ready to dive into the cosmos of this literary maestro's mind? Then keep on reading, because what follows is a voyage unlike any other.
Did you know, Vladimir Nabokov had a profound love for lepidopterology (the study of butterflies and moths)? Well, he did, and much like his passion for these vibrant creatures, his words flutter around in the psyche, leaving a lasting, enchanting imprint, just like the best of these “Lyrical Vladimir Nabokov Quotes”. Indeed, many parallels can be drawn between his dual loves – intricate, colorful, and requiring careful observation to fully appreciate their beauty. Similarly, our curated collection of “Vladimir Nabokov Quotes” is guaranteed to bring color, depth, and a certain iridescence to your thought process, very much like a butterfly leaving its cocoon. Get ready to spread your wings and let these quotes transport you to the literary cosmos that Nabokov so masterfully created.
The Beguiling Art of Language
1. “Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.” – Speak, Memory
2. “We are most artistically caged.” – Pale Fire
3. “To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.” – Ada
4. “Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.” – Pale Fire
5. “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” – Lolita
6. “The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.” – The Gift
7. “Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated.” – Pnin
8. “I confess, I do not believe in time.” – Transparent Things
9. “Reality is a very subjective affair.” – Lolita
10. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain.” – Pale Fire
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The Illusive Nature of Love and Desire
- “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” – Lolita
- “My loins were still smoldering. But for the present only this pearl of fog in the city’s throat was real.” – Lolita
- “There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts.” – Speak, Memory
- “My dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights.” – Lolita
- “No love can cut our knife engraved lives.” – Ada
- “Curiosity is the purest form of insubordination.” – Transparent Things
- “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” – Speak, Memory
- “Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation.” – Strong Opinions
- “And the rest is rust and stardust.” – Lolita
- “Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.” – Lolita
The Intriguing World of Perception
- “Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.” – Lolita
- “Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one’s stomach the separation from terra – these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known…” – Playboy Interview
- “It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.” – Pale Fire
- “Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.” – Lolita
- “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.” – Speak, Memory
- “Our imagination flies — we are its shadow on the earth.” – Speak, Memory
- “Man’s life as commentary to abstruse unfinished poem.” – Pale Fire
- “He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.” – Lolita
- “I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.” – Speak, Memory
- “The future is but the obsolete in reverse.” – Lolita
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The Striking Intensity of Emotions
- “Innocence palls. I am invariably late for my appointments…sometimes as much as two days.” – Laughter in the Dark
- “Memory is, it so often seems to me, a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s mind voiceless and deaf, unable to communicate with the present, except in dreams.” – Speak, Memory
- “Genius is an African who dreams up snow.” – Transparent Things
- “Life is a state of mind.” – Lolita
- “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.” – Lectures on Literature
- “To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love, to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not – this is the beginning of writing.” – Strong Opinions
- “Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.” – Strong Opinions
- “The one who loves less is always loved more.” – Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
- “Don’t be shy. Shine!” – Pale Fire
- “Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.” – Strong Opinions
The Resounding Resilience of the Human Spirit
- “The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror.” – Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
- “Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.” – Speak, Memory
- “Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals.” – Speak, Memory
- “It is certainly not then — not in dreams — but when one is wide awake, in moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits.” – Speak, Memory
- “A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.” – Lolita
- “Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.” – Lectures on Literature
- “Let all of life be an unfettered howl.” – Speak, Memory
- “One is always at home in one’s past…” – Speak, Memory
- “The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.” – Speak, Memory
- “There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.” – Speak, Memory
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