Vladimir Nabokov

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.

One is always at home in one's past.

...for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.

All the information I have about myself is from forged documents.

Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.

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.

I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.

Genius is finding the invisible link between things.

Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.

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.

You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.

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.

All religions are based on obsolete terminology.

Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.

while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.