Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

The spectacle is at the same time the mirage of self in the mirror of things.

It's kind of like when you look at yourself in the mirror and you say your name. And it gets to a point where none of it seems real.

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.

Real life? Well, I just hope mine isn't investigated. They might find that I don't really exist - that I'm just a hologram.

The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.

Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are - hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.

When I look in the mirror, I see about a thousand different Jadas.

I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That's more of your quills. I don't want a hide full, thanks. I have always figured that you die each day and and each day is a is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you have died a couple thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.

Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.

Remember it's all just a mirror we made to see ourselves in.

In photos, I don't know who the real me is - it's all pretend, just pretend. There's not much of myself in my work. If I'm looking in the mirror and I'm working, I'm looking at my make-up and my hair. It's not the same as looking at myself.

One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.

I wore Nietzsche's eyes. Now that I step back to see, I haven't been me.

Gazing into the mirror, I saw myself as I was-a black silhouette in the room, a woman whose darkness had completely leaked through.

I wondered how I looked to her, in that place, and knew that even in a place that was nothing but knowledge that was the one thing I could not know. That if I look inward I would see only infinite mirrors staring into myself for eternity.

Saw myself naked in front of a mirror a couple days ago - that's not the joke, that's what we called the setup. I saw myself naked, and I said, 'Holy cow, I'm 'The White Man.' I've heard a lot of bad things about you, cracka.

When I can't see myself in the mirror, I can't even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all.

There was a time when only wise books were read helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.

For every seeing soul, there are two absorbing facts - I, and the abyss.

The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .

Ours has been called a culture of narcissism. The label is apt but can be misleading. It reads colloquially as selfishness and self-absorption. But these images do not capture the anxiety behind our search for mirrors. We are insecure in our understanding of ourselves, and this insecurity breeds a new preoccupation with the question of who we are. We search for ways to see ourselves. The computer is a new mirror, the first psychological machine. Beyond its nature as an analytical engine lies its second nature as an evocative object.

The world isn't what I've believed it to be, and I am not what I believed me to be, and neither is anyone.

[We assume] that the self is an actual living thing, but it's not. It's a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death.