Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

Dorian used to watch you like a starving man who wants meat. Now he looks at you like he wants seconds.

She was everything he'd ever wanted, beauty and fire arching against his despoiling hands.

It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.

Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you. Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you. And without feet I can make my way to you, without a mouth I can swear your name. Break off my arms, I'll take hold of you with my heart as with a hand. Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat. And if you consume my brain with fire, I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.

To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.

I hear you calling and it's needles and pins (And pins) I want to hurt you just to hear you screaming my name Don't want to touch you but you're under my skin (Deep in) I want to kiss you but your lips are venomous poison

Boy poison - a boy's kisses were like a poison, which infected you and after you were exposed you craved more, like an addict.

Passionate love is a quenchless thirst.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire

But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?

Ah, if I could only pray the way that dog looks at meat.

Breathing him in wasn't enough, I wanted to inhale him. The leather, the smoke, the sweetness.

And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.

For one half second, I wondered what it would feel like to put my hand in the fire. What it would feel like when I burned.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.

Now the dark air is like fire on my skin, And even the moonlight is blinding

And after awhile of this my brain and my body and every single inch of me that was alive was flooded with the feeling that I was starving, starving for Edmond. And what a coincidence, that was the feeling I loved best in the world.

I want to moan and writhe with you and I want to go up to you and kiss your mouth and pull you to me and say "I love you I love you I love you" while stripping. I want you so bad it stings.

I can’t wait to find out how you taste, and you won’t want me to stop even after I’ve completely exhausted you. You’ll think you were on fire, your skin will burn. I’ll suck all of your juices out of you. And then I’ll drink your blood.

Never a possession, always the possessor, with skin as pale as smoke, and eyes tawny and sharp as yellow wine: Desire is everything you have ever wanted. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. Everything.

All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that.

He never hurries. He never shows his cards. He always hangs up first....Like when we first started talking on the phone, he would always be the one who got off first. When we kissed, he always pulled away first. He always kept me just on the edge of crazy. Feeling like I wanted him too much, which just made me want him more....[It was] excruciating and wonderful. It feels good to want something that bad. I thought about him the way you think about dinner when you haven't eaten for a day and a half. Like you'd sell your soul for it.

You cannot conceive how I ache to be with you: how I would die for one hour.