Vladimir Nabokov Zitate

seite 3

„Nichts auf der Welt verabscheue ich mehr als kollektive Aktivität, diese öffentliche Badeanstalt, wo sich die Behaarten und die Glitschigen zu einer Multiplizierung der Mittelmäßigkeit treffen.“

„Ich weiß nicht, ob jemals festgestellt wurde, daß ein Hauptmerkmal des Lebens die Separatheit ist. Wenn uns keine Fleischesschicht umhüllt, sterben wir. Der Mensch existiert nur in dem Maße, in dem er von seiner Umwelt abgesondert ist.“

“A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle…”

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

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

“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

“Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”

“Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.”

“She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.”

“Ink, a Drug.”

“We are most artistically caged.”

“One is always at home in one's past…”

“Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.”

“Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.”

“Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!”

“…(hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)…”

“… in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.”

“The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.”

“For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.”

“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.”

“Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.”

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

“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a child.”

“It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.”

“Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.”

“I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze
I cannot get out, said the starling”

“My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.”

“There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me.”

“Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.”

“Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.”