CNVB > CNVB's Quotes

“There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs. ”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“Dear Jesus, do something.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and
Infinite aftertime: above your head
They close like giant wings, and you are dead.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane...”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an american businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“The lost glove is happy.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“My God died young. Theolatry i found
Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs God; but was I free?”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“that is his head, containing a brain of a different brand than that of the synthetic jellies preserved in the skulls around him”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire