Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire (1962)

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Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

Vladimir Nabokov
What!" cried Bretwit in candid surprise, "They know at home that His Majesty has left Zembla?

Vladimir Nabokov
I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least.

Vladimir Nabokov
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.

Vladimir Nabokov
The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund's last breath.

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

Vladimir Nabokov
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
by the false azure in the windowpane;

Vladimir Nabokov
Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.

Vladimir Nabokov
All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.

Vladimir Nabokov
This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious.

Vladimir Nabokov
We can at last describe his tie, an Easter gift from a dressy butcher, his brother in law in Onhava: imitation silk, colour chocolate brown barred with red, the end tucked into the shirt between the second and third buttons - a Zemblan fashion of the ninteen thirties.

Vladimir Nabokov
Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.

Vladimir Nabokov
Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? Is that a crime? I countered, and they all laughed.

Vladimir Nabokov