Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita Quotes

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

Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.

The moral sense in mortals is the dutyWe have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.

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.

If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too

I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me.

You must be careful. There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere.

I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.

Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight

And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy

I had possessed her - and she never knew it.

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.

... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.

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

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