Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

I think that we're all totally isolated beings and always will be.

For each one of us stands alone in the midst of a universe.

I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.

Eventually, we all end up alone.

Our natures are a lot like oil, mix us with anything else, and we strive to swim on top.

We're all in this alone.

We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.

When even the most strictly logical mind looks round and investigates the phenomena attending its own existence, perhaps the first fact to attract attention by its strongly marked prominence is the remarkable loneliness of man. He stands alone.

At the narrow passage there is no brother and no friend

All human beings are lonely at the core. We come alone, we go alone.

Just as I shall lie alone in the grave, so, in essence, do I live alone.

You need not think that because we chanced to be born of the same parents, I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest claim: I can tell you this - if the whole human race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you in the old world, and betake myself to new.

Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.

To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.

Only man has become an outsider - and because of his own efforts. On his own, he has separated himself from existence.

It's a hell of a thing to be born, and if you're born you're at least entitled to your own self.

All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.

Man, by definition, is born a stranger: coming from nowhere, he is thrust into an alien world which existed before him-a world which didn't need him. And which will survive him.

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.

What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?

From birth to death we are alone.

But there it is: Everyone is alone, for life, and maybe that's not such a bad thing.

If a person can build a fence around himself, he is bound to do it.

People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.