Quotes By Author: Vladimir Nabokov

“And speaking of evolution, can we imagine the origin and stepping stones and rejected mutations of Time? Has there ever been a “primitive” form of Time in which, say, the Past was not yet clearly differentiated from the Present, so that past shadows and shapes showed through the still soft, long, larval “now”?”

“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.”

“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.”

“And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference betweenTwo methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind,A testing of performing words, while heIs soaping a third time one leg, and B,The other kind, much more decorous, whenHe’s in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought,The abstract battle is concretely fought.The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar[850] A canceled sunset or restore a star,And thus it physically guides the phraseToward faint daylight through the inky maze.But method A is agony! The brainIs soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the willCan interrupt, while the automatonIs taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before.”

“The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author’s supervision swell gradually with the reader’s lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that – not very appetizing – food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.”

“The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one’s position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo’s natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.”

“- 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.”

“Ink, a Drug.”

“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying “wolf, wolf” and there was no wolf behind him.”

“. . .the mad conjurer at the ward whose pet obsession was that gravity had something to do with the blood circulation of a Supreme Being.”

“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.”

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

“All religions are based on obsolete terminology.”

“The square root of I is I.”

“Don’t touch me; I’ll die if you touch me.”