- Nabokov continues to think about inherited traits, particularly his desire for and ability to link particular moments to particular places.
- "The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait." (3.7.1)
- His father was like this too, liking to visit a spot in the forest where he and his tutor had once captured a rare butterfly.
- In 1904, when the family summered on the Adriatic coast, Nabokov remembers tracing a map of Vyra (like the one offered at the beginning of this book) on his pillowcase.
- Even grumpy Uncle Ruka shares this brand of nostalgia; Vladimir watches him take French children's books from the shelf, moaning in pleasure at a passage he himself loved as a child.
- Though Vladimir gave him the side-eye at the time, he realizes much later, upon seeing that same book, the value and pleasure of nostalgia.
- "A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory...Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die." (3.7.3)