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Vladimir Nabokov Quotes about Past

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov
Nature, Past, Smell

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

One is always at home in one's past.

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

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.

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

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”

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

...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

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

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

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

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

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

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”

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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