More Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.
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.
Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.
Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
