Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it. "He who desires but acts not," wrote Blake with his accustomed vigor, "Breeds pestilence.

In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.

He has sat on the fence so long that the iron has entered his soul.

It's not like you make a decision and everything inside you is 100 percent happy.

The individual (no matter how well-meaning he might be, no matter how much strength he might have, if only he would use it) does not have the passion to rip himself away from either the coils of Reflection or the seductive ambiguities of Reflection; nor do the surroundings and times have any events or passions, but rather provide a negative setting of a habit of reflection, which plays with some illusory project only to betray him in the end with a way out: it shows him that the most clever thing to do is nothing at all.

At that moment I had no mind to change, or not change, or throw against the nearest wall.

The sense of paralysis proceeds not so much out of the mammoth size of the problem but out of the puniness of the purpose.

Someone shouts, "Enough!" and I think too much and nothing at all.

Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.

I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

He suffered from paralysis by analysis.

Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction?

Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.

It's like I had two things pulling at me: you want to be a fighter, and you have problems. So I couldn't be a fighter, and I wasn't solving any problems.

I feel guilty: when I'm not golfing, I feel like I should be golfing. And when I'm golfing, I feel like I should be home working or spending time with the family. So it's a real conundrum.

I'm able to do nothing.

I have back-and-forth feelings about everything a lot - it's not limited to my albums.

There's a conflict between what's in your mind and what's in your body.

There is no shame is being ambivalent about almost everything in your life.

When one does nothing, one believes oneself responsible for everything.

Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation.

In this mob of I's inside, which one is me? Hear me out. I know I'm wandering, but don't start putting a lid on this racket. No telling what I'll do then. Every moment I'm thrown by your story. One moment it's happy, and I'm singing. One moment it's sad, and I'm weeping. It turns bitter, and I pull away. But then you spill a little grace, and just like that, I'm all light. It's not so bad, this arrangement, actually.

No good neurotic finds it difficult to be both opinionated and indecisive.

All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse's pudgy face.