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

How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
~ Vladimir Nabokov ~












How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human ...
Show MoreMore Vladimir Nabokov quotes
"A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brigh...
"I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
"Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
"The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
"When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted th...
"He could swear he did not look back, could not—by any optical chance, or in any prism—have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadf...
"Do all people have that? A face, a phrase, a landscape, an air bubble from the past suddenly floating up as if released by the head warden's child fro...
"But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets it rolling, doomed never again to stop?
"I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a signboard had one word spelled ...
"For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, "pinging" pebble...
"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...
"IphWas a larvorium and a violet:A grave in Reason's early spring. And yetIt missed the gist of the whole thing; it missedWhat mostly interests the pre...
"I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody ...
"The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason ...