Skip to content

Quotes from Pale Fire — Vladimir Nabokov

1899–1977 Russia

← All quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

14 quotes

In due time history will have denounced everybody.

Pale Fire (1962)

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

Pale Fire (1962)

No free man needs a God; but was I free?

Pale Fire (1962)

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.

Pale Fire (1962)

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

Pale Fire (1962)

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

Pale Fire (1962)

True art is above false honor.

Pale Fire (1962)

For we die every day; oblivion thrives
Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,
And our best yesterdays are now foul piles
Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.

Pale Fire (1962)

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
by the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

Pale Fire (1962)

Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

Pale Fire (1962)

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 nineteen thirties.

Pale Fire (1962)

You have hal...... real bad, chum.

Pale Fire (1962)

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.

Pale Fire (1962)

What moment in that gradual decay
Does resurrection choose? What year?
Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape?
Are some less lucky, or do all escape?
A syllogism; other men die
But I am not another: therefore I'll not die.

Pale Fire (1962)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Vladimir Nabokov (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.