Q: "Why should I not think the best of those who are kind to me?" (The Quiver, 1881).

A: "The problem with kindness, for Nabokov, is that most visible or public forms of it are fake" (Will Norman & Duncan White, Transitional Nabokov, 2009).

A traveler realizes "that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as that of one's father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language . . . Thus the traveler spells the landscape and its sense is disclosed, and likewise, the intricate pattern of human life turns out to be monogrammatic, now quite clear to the inner eye disentangling the interwoven letters." —Vladimir Navokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

"Don't be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present.   Beware of the most honest broker.  Remember that what you are told is really threefold:  shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale." —Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

"Memory has its own special kind.  It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own."
—Salman Rushdie

"It is not the parts that matter, it is their combinations." —Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Keep love letters and give them "night-lodgings, because it is safer to let such things sleep, lest, when killed, they haunt us as ghosts." —Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

"It is far too easy to talk of a dead author behind the backs of his books."
—Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

"The common pebble you find in your fist after having thrust your arm shoulder deep into water, where a jewel seemed to gleam on pale sand, is really the coveted gem though it looks like a pebble as it dries in the sun of everyday." —Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

"I have learnt one secret . . . : that the soul is but a manner of being—not a constant state—that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations." —Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

"No real idea can be said to exist without the words made to measure." —Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"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, Speak, Memory

"There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic."
—Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

"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, Speak Memory, revised edition, 1967, p. 13).

Vladimir Nabokov answers the "Nature vs. Nurture" question: