More Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.
Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.
I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
