Vladimir Nabokov

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes

Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.

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

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.

We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness

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.

Let all of life be an unfettered howl.

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