Vladimir Nabokov Quotes About Past

Quotes about: Past

• The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Art, Sunset, Past

  Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov”, p.97, Vintage

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Nature, Past, Smell

• I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Past, Drunk, Impossible

  Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated”, p.375, Vintage

• It is certainly not then-not in dreams- but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Dream, Truth, Past

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1989). “Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited”

• But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years - problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space - and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Fashion, Past, Years

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Home, Past

  Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov”, p.492, Vintage

• Perhaps if the year was 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Past, Years, Class

  Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated”, p.154, Vintage

• No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Country, Writing, Past

  Vladimir Nabokov (2010). “Lolita”, p.314, Vintage

• ...and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Past, Night, Glasses

  Vladimir Nabokov (2016). “Lolita”, p.38, Hamilton Books

• 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.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Past, Seductive, Brain

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1996). “Novels, 1969-1974”

• I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Character, Past, World

  Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov”, p.480, Vintage

• My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Summer, Mother, Memories

  Vladimir Nabokov (2016). “Lolita”, p.3, Hamilton Books

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Home, Past, Novelists

  1964 Interview in Playboy, Jan.

• When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Past, Imagination, Trying

  Vladimir Nabokov (2016). “Lolita”, p.5, Hamilton Books

• I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Memories, Past, Achievement

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1996). “Novels and Memoirs, 1941-1951”, Library of America

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Past, Derivatives, Originality

  1967 Interview in the Paris Review, Summer.

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