How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies [...] It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. (6.6.6)
Nabokov seems to be making the argument here that the natural world—a place without clocks—is a refuge from time and mortality. What do you think?
Quote #8
The years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know. (15.1.1)
Time passes, people die, and their knowledge is irretrievably lost. We're not going to lie—this makes us a little sad. But Nabokov seems to have a solution for this: by recovering memories, telling stories, and writing books, we can—if only for a moment—stop time.
Quote #9
Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time. (15.1.4)
What is love held up against time? Nabokov isn't saying he knows the answer, only that he's interested in the question. In this book, he's offering us a universe of his past and present, his loved ones and his obsessions. But, he might ask (forever the moody thinker), so what?