How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me. [...] The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes. (3.5.2)
With the wealth the Nabokovs lost in being exiled, it can be easy to focus on the money and cars and houses and cash. But Nabokov firmly reminds us that in exile he lost every remnant of his childhood. As a result, memory and artifacts have become important to him as an adult, as he continues to look for something left of his time in St. Petersburg. Perhaps this book goes some way toward a salve?
Quote #2
In result, that particular return to Russia, my first conscious return, seems to me now, sixty years later, a rehearsal—not of the grand homecoming that will never take place, but of its constant dream in my long years of exile. (5.1.3)
If you want us to pull a Katy Perry, we'll happily oblige: Russia is "the one that got away." We don't mean to compare exile to a mediocre pop song, but it is indeed along the same line: because a sense of home and geographical belonging has been taken from Vladimir, he'll always wonder "what if?"
Quote #3
On the following morning, however, when she unlocked the wardrobe to take something out, my Swallowtail, with a mighty rustle, flew into her face, then made for the open window, and presently was but a golden fleck dipping and dodging and soaring eastward, over timber and tundra, to Vologda, Viatka and Perm, and beyond the gaunt Ural range to Yakutsk and Verkhne Kolymsk, and from Verkhne Kolymsk, where it lost a tail, to the fair Island of St. Lawrence, and across Alaska to Dawson, and southward along the Rocky Mountains—to be finally overtaken and captured, after a forty-year race, on an immigrant dandelion under an endemic aspen near Boulder. (6.1.3)
Yes, this is one long quote. But that's because it's earned it: take a butterfly that escaped Vladimir's collection, and follow it through its life until he finds it again. It's a neat little allegory that explains Vladimir's lost-and-found sense of home post-exile.
Quote #4
I was annoyed at going to a fascinating region in mid-November, long after the collecting season was over, having never been very good at digging for pupae (though, eventually, I did turn up a few beneath a big oak in our Crimean garden). (12.3.1)
In the early days of exile, Vladimir didn't yet understand the gravity of the situation. After all, they were still in Russia, and there was still plenty of time for butterfly collecting. We don't blame him for focusing on such things, however. Living as normally as possible is as good a coping technique as any.
Quote #5
...until the writing of a novel relieved me of that fertile emotion, the loss of my country was equated for me with the loss of my love. (12.4.1)
Ice cream works for us, but whatever floats your boat.
Quote #6
The break in my own destiny affords me in retrospect a syncopal kick that I would not have missed for worlds. Ever since that exchange of letters with Tamara, homesickness has been with me a sensuous and particular matter. (12.5.3)
Nabokov links interrupted letters from his first girlfriend Tamara with his interrupted life as a Russian. But how are romantic love and patriotic love the same? (And anyway, didn't Vladimir, like, break up with Tamara kinda-sorta before the Nabokovs even left for Yalta?)
Quote #7
And I thought of all I had missed in my country, of the things I would not have omitted to note and treasure, had I suspected before that my life was to veer in such a violent way. (13.3.3)
The whole book is full of the joys and oddities of Nabokov's St. Petersburg childhood. It's almost as if he's trying to piece together everything he's lost.
Quote #8
I would listen to my heart knocking and feel the blind drizzle on my face and hear, in the distance, the broken sounds of the game, and think of myself as of a fabulous exotic being in an English footballer's disguise, composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew. (13.4.3)
Even though Vladimir defends himself from literary, communist-sympathizing Nesbit's ribbing for wasting time playing sports, he actually uses the time to romanticize himself, to figure out a way to feel better about his life as a man without a country. "A fabulous exotic [...] in a footballer's disguise"? Sure! Whatever works, Vlad.
Quote #9
"I suppose it would be easy for a detached observer to poke fun at all those hardly palpable people who imitated in foreign cities a dead civilization" (14.2.4)
Émigrés often cling to each other, looking for a sense of their lost homes. It can seem ridiculous—trying to hold onto something that will never reemerge—but it can also provide hope and support where elsewhere there's none.
Quote #10
Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, [...] like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness. (14.2.10)
Sirin is one of the writers Vladimir meets when he is an émigré in Berlin and Paris. Using the meteor simile, Nabokov gives the sense that an émigré can be under the radar, without a country or audience, unless one is very lucky.