It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
— Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian and American novelist, poet, translator and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia, he wrote his first nine novels in Russian while living in Berlin, then moved to the United States, switched to English and found international fame. He taught Russian literature at Cornell from 1948 to 1959.
His 1955 novel Lolita is counted among the greatest works of 20th-century literature, and Pale Fire and his memoir Speak, Memory are also widely admired. He spoke Russian, English and French, was an expert on butterflies and a composer of chess problems, and spent his last years in Montreux, Switzerland. Time praised his English for combining Joycean wordplay with a Proustian sense of mood and setting.
His 1955 novel Lolita is counted among the greatest works of 20th-century literature, and Pale Fire and his memoir Speak, Memory are also widely admired. He spoke Russian, English and French, was an expert on butterflies and a composer of chess problems, and spent his last years in Montreux, Switzerland. Time praised his English for combining Joycean wordplay with a Proustian sense of mood and setting.
Most quoted works
- Lolita 33
- Speak, Memory 13
- Pale Fire 10
- Bend Sinister 7
- Despair 7
- The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov 6
Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
— Lolita
Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
— Mary
The square root of I is I.
— Bend Sinister
All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
— Pale Fire
You have to be an artist and a madman...
— Lolita
We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.
— Bend Sinister
A thousand years ago five minutes were / Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and / Infinite aftertime: above your head / They close like giant wings, and you are dead.
— Pale Fire
Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
— Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.
— Pnin
I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
— Speak, Memory
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
— Bend Sinister
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open
— Lolita
And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference b
— Pale Fire
The idea of God was invented in the small hours of history by a scam who had genius; it somehow reeks too much of humanity, that idea, to make its azure origin plausible...
— Despair
Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight
— Lolita
The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.
— Mary