vladimir nabokov

Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.

Hammock and honey: eighty years later he could still recall with the young pang of the original joy his falling in love with Ada. Memory met imagination halfway in the hammock of his boyhood's dawns. At ninety four he liked retracing that first amorous summer not as a dream he had just had but as a recapitulation of consciousness to sustain him in the small grey hours between shallow sleep and the first pill of the day.

this is the most perfect tumblr that i have EVER laid eyes on.I love that you have the diversity, whereas everyone else just posts lolita; thank you!Could you make the occaisional post with a synopsis for a few of his books? I've only read a few (they're so hard to find where i live) and when i do find them, i just can't choose!

He was omniscient. Better say, omni-incest. "That's right," said the other total-recaller.

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 thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express it, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon

No Leslie, I'm not dead. I have finished building a world, and this is my Sabbath rest

To her he would surrender the remnants of his self at the first trumpet blast of destiny.

There was always something colorfully impressionistic, but also infantile, about Ada's allusions to her affairs of the flesh, reminding one of baffle painting, or little glass labyrinths with two peas, or the Ardis throwing trap -- you remember? -- which tossed up clay pigeons and pine cones to be shot at, or cockamaroo (Russian "biks"), played with a toy cue on the billiard cloth of an oblong board with holes and hoop, bells and pins among which the ping-pong-sized eburnean ball zigzagged with bix-pix concussions.

There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity

What are dreams? A random sequence of scenes, trivial or tragic, viatic or static, fantastic or familiar, featuring more or less plausible events patched up with grotesque details, and recasting dead people in new settings.

Last night, I tried to make a poem about it for you, but I can't write verse; it begins, it only begins: Ada, our ardors and arbors -- but the rest is all fog, try to fancy the rest.

“I used to love history,” said Marina, “I loved to identify myself with famous women.”

She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.