Vladimir Nabokov

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She wa...”

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”

“Genius is an African who dreams up snow.”

“Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”

“No one can any longer write in the fat style of Strauss. That was killed by Stravinsky. He stripped the body of much of its clothes. Music is the craft of building structures with sound and...”

“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes”

“Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as...”

“I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her –after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred–I would gather her...”

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”

“Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.”

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl.”

“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 of specific significance for us: here sha...”

“Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.”

“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.”

“The square root of I is I.”

“All religions are based on obsolete terminology.”

“You have to be an artist and a madman...”

“Light in comparison with darkness is a void.”