It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
I think it is all a matter of love the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece
Don’t cry, I’m sorry to have deceived you so much, but that’s how life is.
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.
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.
Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: ‘There is nothing softer than your heart.’ And I lowered my gaze…
– A sentyment staje się uciążliwy. W końcu jest coś nazbyt fizycznego w próbie zachowania cząstki dzieciństwa na swoim mostku. – Nie pan pierwszy sprowadza wiarę do zmysłu dotyku.
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.
Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled…in a unique and inimitable way.
A thousand years ago five minutes wereEqual to forty ounces of fine sand.Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime andInfinite aftertime: above your headThey close like giant wings, and you are dead.
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.
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.
We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.
He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.
(T)here exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time.
I dreamt of you last night – as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.
Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!
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.
But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets it rolling, doomed never again to stop?
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
It’s a pity one can’t imagine what one can’t compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is.
I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.
A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle…
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions.
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss.
I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
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
The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.
And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference b
… she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.
Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.
Our imagination flies — we are its shadow on the earth.
Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
[S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.
How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor.
The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, “pinging” pebbles at an empty can.
Religion is boring and alien to me and relates no more than a chimera to what is to me the reality of the spirit.
We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins.
Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one’s stomach the separation from terra… these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known…
The moral sense in mortals is the dutyWe have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.
And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy
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…
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight
…for she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum.
He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle.
The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]
…I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get rid of that book….
He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle.
Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.
I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.
In this very special self-hypnotic state there can be no question of getting out of touch with on[e]self and floating into a normal sleep (unless you are very tired at the start)
Everything he said should be followed by a big sic
All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.
The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman’s effort.
I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.
You must be careful. There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere.
It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.
On such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen mud and horror in my heart.
Lighted advertisements went running up dark red facades and dissipating again. He would pass girls; he would turn to look; but the prettier the face, the harder it was to take the plunge.
Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities.
Good by-aye!” she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this.
Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader’s heart.
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.
The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
The days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation can.
As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs.
Genius is finding the invisible link between things.
I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth.
I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.
I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.
Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one’s reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?
I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you’ve done to me.
If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too
Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature’s reality, the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me.
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.
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.
Coordinating thereEvents and objects with remote eventsAnd vanished objects. Making ornamentsOf accidents and possibilities.
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
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 that is what Stravinsky represents.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.My sin, my soul.
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.