Vladimir Nabokov Zitate

seite 4

„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 work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing… I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.”

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
by the false azure in the windowpane;”

“I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”

“I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.”

“The square root of I is I.”

“Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.”

“There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.”

“Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?”

“There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.”

“Genius is finding the invisible link between things.”

“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.”

“In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.”

“I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.”

“All religions are based on obsolete terminology.”

“do what only a true artist can do… pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation”

“What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being.”

“Look at this tangle of thorns.”

“We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.”

“How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!”

“There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.”

“My God died young. Theolatry i found
Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs God; but was I free?”

“… 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.”

“Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.”

“…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.”

“To begin with, let us take the following motto… Literature is Love. Now we can continue.”

“Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.”