Speak, Memory Quotes

“plage, various seaside chairs and stools supported the parents”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

“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―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal. ― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (‎ Everyman's Library; Illustrated edition, March 23, 1999) Oribinally published January 1, 1966.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Everything he said should be followed by a big sic”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“It is probably true, as some have argued, that sympathy for Leninism on the part of English and American liberal opinion in the twenties was swung by consideration of home politics. But it was also due to simple misinformation. My friend knew little of Russia’s past and this little had come to him through polluted Communist channels. When challenged to justify the bestial terror that had been sanctioned by Lenin—the torture-house, the blood-bespattered wall—Nesbit would tap the ashes out of his pipe against the fender knob, recross sinistrally his huge, heavily shod, dextrally crossed legs, and murmur something about the “Allied Blockade.” He lumped together as “Czarist elements” Russian émigrés of all hues, from peasant Socialist to White general—much as today Soviet writers wield the term “Fascist.” He never realized that had he and other foreign idealists been Russians in Russia, he and they would have been destroyed by Lenin’s regime as naturally as rabbits are by ferrets and farmers.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“With a very few exceptions, all liberal-minded creative forces—poets, novelists, critics, historians, philosophers and so on—had left Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia. Those who had not were either withering away there or adulterating their gifts by complying with the political demands of the state. What the Tsars had never been able to achieve, namely the complete curbing of minds to the government’s will, was achieved by the Bolsheviks in no time after the main contingent of the intellectuals had escaped abroad or had been destroyed. The lucky group of expatriates could now follow their pursuits with such utter impunity that, in fact, they sometimes asked themselves if the sense of enjoying absolute mental freedom was not due to their working in an absolute void. True, there was among émigrés a sufficient number of good readers to warrant the publication, in Berlin, Paris, and other towns, of Russian books and periodicals on a comparatively large scale; but since none of those writings could circulate within the Soviet Union, the whole thing acquired a certain air of fragile unreality.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“And a tiny looper caterpillar would be there, too, measuring, like a child’s finger and thumb, the rim of the table, and every now and then stretching upward to grope, in vain, for the shrub from which it had been dislodged.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“all forms of vitality are forms of velocity, and no wonder a growing child desires to out-Nature Nature by filling a minimum stretch of time with a maximum of spatial enjoyment. Innermost in man is the spiritual pleasure derivable from the possibilities of outtugging and outrunning gravity, of overcoming or re-enacting the earth's pull.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Бях на седемнайсет години; втората любов и първите нощни безпокойства занимаваха цялото ми свободно време, за материалната страна на живота през ум не ми минаваше - пък и върху фона на общото благополучие на семейството ми никакво наследство не можеше особено да изпъкне, но сега ми е съвсем странно и дори ми е малко неприятно да мисля, че през кратката година, докато владеех това обречено наследство, бях твърде погълнат от баналностите на младостта – губеща вече първичните си багри, - за да изпитам каквото и да било допълнително удоволствие от веществената собственост върху къщата и дебрите, които душата ми и без това владееше, или каквато и да било досада, когато болшевишкият преврат за една нощ унищожи тази веществена собственост.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Някой си Л., журналист, човек добър, нуждаещ се и невеж, в желанието си да изрази благодарност към баща ми, че му оказал някаква материална помощ, написа възторжена статия за жалките ми стоховце, към петстотин реда, от които капеха сладникави похвали; татко научил за нея и успял да попречи на публикуването ѝ, ясно си спомнях как четохме писарския почерк на ръкописа и издавахме звуци – смесица от скърцане със зъби и тънък стон, с какъвто у нас сдържано реагирахме на безвкусицата, неудобното положение, пошлата грешка. Тази история ме излекува завинаги от всякакъв интерес към бързата литературна слава и бе вероятно причина за почти патологичното ми безразличие към „рецензиите”, лоши или хубави, умни или глупави, което по-късно ме лиши от много остри изживявания, присъщи, както разправят, на авторските натури.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“...for she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“I see the steam of the chocolate and the plates of blueberry tarts.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one’s position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo’s natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighbouring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur – all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

“Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

“The village schoolmaster took us for instructive walks ('what you hear is the sound of a scythe being sharpened' ; 'that field there will be given a rest next season ';'oh, just a small bird...no special name '; 'if that peasant is drunk, it is because he is poor ') 71”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“also toyed with The Anthemion which is the name of a honeysuckle ornament, consisting of elaborate interlacements and expanding clusters, but nobody liked it;”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

“An exciting sense of rodina, ‘motherland,’ was for the first time organically mingled with the comfortably creaking snow, the deep footprints across it, the red gloss of the engine stack, the birch logs piled high, under their private layer of transportable snow, on the red tender. I was not quite six, but that year abroad, a year of difficult decisions and liberal hopes, had exposed a small Russian boy to grown-up conversations. He could not help being affected in some way of his own by a mother’s nostalgia and a father’s patriotism. In result, that particular return to Russia, my first conscious return, seems to me now, sixty years later, a rehearsal – not of the grand homecoming that will never take place, but of its constant dream in my long years of exile.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“But the most constant source of enchantment during those readings came from the harlequin pattern of colored panes inset in a whitewashed framework on either side of the veranda. The garden when viewed through these magic glasses grew strangely still and aloof. If one looked through blue glass, the sand turned to cinders while inky trees swam in a tropical sky. The yellow created an amber world infused with an extra strong brew of sunshine. The red made the foliage drip ruby dark upon a pink footpath. The green soaked greenery in a greener green. And when, after such richness, one turned to a small square of normal, savorless glass, with its lone mosquito or lame daddy longlegs, it was like taking a draught of water when one is not thirsty, and one saw a matter-of-fact white bench under familiar trees. But of all the windows this is the pane through which in later years parched nostalgia longed to peer.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Esiste, nella scala dimensionale del mondo, un punto di incontro tra conoscenza ed immaginazione. Un punto al quale si perviene rimpicciolendo le cose grandi ed ingrandendo quelle piccole.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“To love with all one's soul and leave the rest to fate, was the simple rule she heeded.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“He made me depict from memory, in the greatest possible detail, objects I had certainly seen thousands of times without visualizing them properly: a street lamp, a postbox, the tulip design on the stained glass of our own front door. He tried to teach me to find the geometrical coordinations between the slender twigs of a leafless boulevard tree, a system of visual give-and-takes, requiring a precision of linear expression, which I failed to achieve in my youth, but applied gratefully, in my adult instar, not only to the drawing of butterfly genitalia during my seven years at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, when immersing myself in the bright wellhole of a microscope to record in India ink this or that new structure; but also, perhaps, to certain camera-lucida needs of literary composition.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“The old and the new, the liberal touch and the patriarchal one, fatal poverty and fatalistic wealth got fantastically interwoven in that strange first decade of our century.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

“That day, he had been ordered to assume supreme command of the Russian Army in the Far East. This incident had a special sequel fifteen years later, when at a certain point of my father’s flight from Bolshevik-held St. Petersburg to southern Russia he was accosted while crossing a bridge, by an old man who looked like a gray-bearded peasant in his sheepskin coat. He asked my father for a light. The next moment each recognized the other. I hope old Kuropatkin, in his rustic disguise, managed to evade Soviet imprisonment, but that is not the point. What pleases me is the evolution of the match theme: those magic ones he had shown me had been trifled with and mislaid, and his armies had also vanished, and everything had fallen through, like my toy trains that, in the winter of 1904–05, in Wiesbaden, I tried to run over the frozen puddles in the grounds of the Hotel Oranien. The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

“I would moreover submit that, in regard to the power of hoarding up impressions, Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them by giving them more than their share, in view of the cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

“A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life. The twenty years I spent in my native Russia (1899–1919) take care of the thetic arc. Twenty-one years of voluntary exile in England, Germany and France (1919–40) supply the obvious antithesis. The period spent in my adopted country (1940–60) forms a synthesis – and a new thesis.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

“The years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“so as to form a narrow passage which I would be further helped to roof snugly with the divan’s bolsters and close up at the ends with a couple of its cushions. I then had the fantastic pleasure of creeping through that pitch-dark tunnel, where I lingered a little to listen to the singing in my ears—that lonesome vibration so familiar to small boys in dusty hiding places—and then, in a burst of delicious panic, on rapidly thudding hands and knees I would reach the tunnel’s far end, push its cushion away, and be welcomed by a mesh of sunshine on the parquet under the canework of a Viennese chair and two gamesome flies settling by turns.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

“В адриатическата вила, която през лятото на 1904 година споделяхме с Петерсонови (до ден-днешен я разпознавам по голямата кула на изгледите от Абация), потънал в мечти по време на сиестата, при спуснати щори, в детското си легло, се обръщах по корем – и грижливо, обичливо, безнадеждно, с художествено съвършени подробности (мъчно съпоставими с нелепо малкия брой на съзнателните ми години) петилетният изгнаник чертаеше с пръст по възглавницата пътя покрай високия парк, локвата с нападали цветове и с мъртвия бръмбар, зелените стълбове и навеса над входа, всичките му стъпала и непременно, кой знае защо, блесналата между коловозите скъпоценна конска подкова като онази, която имах късмет да намеря веднъж – и при това душата ми се късаше, както се къса и сега. Хайде, обяснете ми, днешни шутове-психолози, тази пронизваща репетиция на носталгията!”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory