Past Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

— Vladimir Nabokov

One is always at home in one's past...

— Vladimir Nabokov

Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the…

— Vladimir Nabokov

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it…

— Vladimir Nabokov

Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not…

— Vladimir Nabokov

When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which…

— Vladimir Nabokov

...and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon…

— Vladimir Nabokov

The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance…

— Vladimir Nabokov

I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to…

— Vladimir Nabokov

It is certainly not then-not in dreams- but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the…

— Vladimir Nabokov

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth…

— Vladimir Nabokov

Perhaps if the year was 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison…

— Vladimir Nabokov

No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this…

— Vladimir Nabokov

But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only…

— Vladimir Nabokov

“There is titillating pleasure in looking back at the past and asking oneself, 'What would have happened if...' and substituting one chance…

— Vladimir Nabokov