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"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."
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Exlpore more Freedom quotes
"When you write by hand, you don't have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, "Is this necessary at this point in the book?"
"The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it."
"When you are imprisoned by the rules of conformity, it tames your imaginative capacity and steals your free thinking abilities."
"Liberation begins with liberation of mind, soul and body."
"You are not, though, forgiving so as to let others off with things. You are forgiving so that you can empower yourself to get over it and become strong."
Explore more quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
"I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die."
"A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die."
"Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives."
"Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up."
"But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions."
"Lighted advertisements went running up dark red facades and dissipating again. He would pass girls; he would turn to look; but the prettier the face, the harder it was to take the plunge."
"The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book."
"To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms -- some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh."
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