My love for you was the throbbing, welling warmth of tears. That is how I imagined paradise: silence and tears, and the warm silk of your knees. This you could not comprehend. — Vladimir Nabokov, Beneficence (Stories of Vladimir Nabokov) Knopf 24 October 1995.
…my Lolita remarked: “You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own”; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert’s Wanted” Poem Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.Age: five thousand three hundred days.Profession: none, or “starlet.” Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze?Why are you hiding, darling?(I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze,I cannot get out, said the starling). Where are you riding, Dolores Haze?What make is the magic carpet?Is a… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. — Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita. (Olympia Press… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
Oh, but she had been so pretty in the weaving of those delicate spells, in the dreamy performance of her enchantments… — Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita. (Olympia Press 1955)
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. ― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita. (Olympia Press 1955)
Her painted eyelids were closed. A tear of no particular meaning gemmed the hard top of her cheek. Nobody could tell what went on in that little head. Waves of desire rippled there. — Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)
I’m walking out now into the soft light, the cooling hum of evening, and I will love you tonight, and tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and still many more, so very many more tomorrows. — Vladimir Nabokov, in a letter to his wife Véra [March 1925] from Letters to Véra, tr. by Olga Voronin… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words. — Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love you – and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created – out of five vowels and three consonants. —Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra. (Penguin… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
The Vale of Soul-Making 