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"A destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate's way - even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications."
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"My friend wants to get moving and so do I,' Eddie said. 'We've got miles to go yet.'I know that. It's on your face, son. Like a scar.'Eddie was fascinated by the idea of duty and ka as something that left a mark, something that might look like decoration to one eye and disfigurement to another. Outside, thunder cracked and lightning flashed."
"My decisions determine my destination long before I ever get there. And once I do get there, I suddenly realize this is not the destination I had in mind because what I had in mind was the fantasy that my denial had created verses the reality my choices crafted."
"God has specific plans and intentions for every man."
"One discovers that destiny can be diverted, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. Once the deforming mirror has been smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness. There is a possibility of joy."
"I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination."
"From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Doth with their death bury their parents' strife. . . . O, I am fortune's fool! . . . Then I defy you, stars."
"From the day I was conceived in my mother's womb, God predestined what I become."
Explore more quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
"The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."
"No free man needs a God; but was I free?How fully I felt nature glued to meAnd how my childish palate loved the tasteHalf-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!My picture book was at an early ageThe painted parchment papering our cage:Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun;Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenonThe iridule - when, beautiful and strange,In a bright sky above a mountain rangeOne opal cloudlet in an oval formReflects the rainbow of a thunderstormWhich in a distant valley has been staged -For we are most artistically caged."
"To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute."
"I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth."
"Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known..."
"You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance."
"We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer."
"Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities."
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