Speak, Memory Time Quotes
How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. (1.1.1)
At first it seems like Nabokov is talking about himself in the third person, but for once, the story isn't literally about him. Of course it's still metaphorically about him: Nabokov is underlining the unsettling weirdness we can feel when thinking about a time when we never existed because it reminds us of our own mortality.
Quote #2
Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison. In probing my childhood (which is the next best to probing one's eternity) I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold. (1.1.4)
What does Nabokov mean when he says that probing childhood is "next best to probing one's eternity"?
Quote #3
At that instant, I became acutely aware that the twenty-seven-year-old being, in soft white and pink, holding my left hand, was my mother, and that the thirty-three-year-old being, in hard white and gold, holding my right hand, was my father. [...] Indeed, from my present ridge of remote, isolated, almost uninhabited time, I see my diminutive self as celebrating, on that August day 1903, the birth of sentient life. (1.1.5)
If you asked most people about the beginning of their life, they'd call up their birth. But for introspective Nabokov, the awareness of time is more important than the exact date of birth. Knowing what time is means understanding how it passes, or at least beginning to.
Quote #4
...the first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile. (1.1.7)
This is a weird little moment in the text, and seems—we think—to say something about the relationship of time to joy. Maybe that's why those immortal vampires are always scowling.
Quote #5
It is surprising what method there was in my bedtime dawdling. True, the whole going-up-the-stairs business now reveals certain transcendental values. Actually, however, I was merely playing for time by extending every second to its utmost. (4.3.4)
As children, we don't have much control over our own schedules. Maybe that's why kids throw so many tantrums. For Vladimir, his "bedtime dawdling" was his own little way to control time the best he could.
Quote #6
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. (6.6.6)
Do you think Nabokov is being serious here, saying he doesn't believe in time? We think he might instead be saying this: stories (with their patterns and coincidences) tell us a lot more than days of the week and months of the year.
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?
Quote #10
I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence. (15.1.4)
By thinking about the universe as an infinite and limitless beauty, and connecting his own life to it, Nabokov can soothe his fear and disgust of time passing. Think about that next time you're bored watching the clock in math class.