"Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
You have to be an artist and a madman...
More Vladimir Nabokov quotes
"Light in comparison with darkness is a void.
"Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
"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.
"I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it a...
"Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
"But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to e...
"Listen—I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don’...
"The square root of I is I.
"We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of...
"Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but sudd...
"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...
"Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece
"Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
"I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturn...