More Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.
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.
I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
We think not in words but in shadows of words.
Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.
There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.
