#Quote
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.
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More Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
We think not in words but in shadows of words.
Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.
Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
I don't think in any language. I think in images.
Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
...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.
And the rest is rust and stardust.
Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
