Life & Mortality Quote by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov takes the most sentimental image in the language - the sunrise - and makes it do suspiciously unsentimental work. “Life is a great sunrise” is almost too lovely, the kind of line you’d expect on a greeting card. Then he tilts it, with that Nabokovian coolness, into a provocation: if we grant life the aesthetic dignity of dawn, why refuse the same dignity to death? The trick is in the phrasing “I do not see why”: it’s faux-reasonable, an eyebrow raised over the abyss. He’s not preaching belief in an afterlife so much as exposing the irrational etiquette that treats death as uniquely obscene.

The subtext is both defiance and style. Nabokov hated the idea of being reduced to a moral lesson, yet he also refused the modern habit of treating mortality as a purely clinical shutdown. By framing death as “an even greater” sunrise, he flips the typical metaphor (death as sunset) and turns the end of consciousness into an expansion rather than a diminishment. It’s an aesthetic argument: our terror may be less a fact than a failure of imagination, a refusal to grant the unknown any beauty.

Context matters. Nabokov was an exile twice over, a man whose life was violently interrupted by history, and whose art fixated on perception - the bright, exacting pleasures of seeing. The line reads like an artist’s last gambit: if existence is measured by luminosity, then perhaps the final threshold deserves the most daring image available.