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.