This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.
Bourgeoisie | Desire | Freedom | Will |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The gentle and vague regions in which I moved assets were poets, not the land of crime
Curiosity | Ignorance | Impression | Order |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra - these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave. Although Lucette had never died before—no, dived before, Violet—from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep — instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter. Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair—t,a,c,l—she could not make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I’ve lost my next note. Got it. The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head,and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes—telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression—that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude. She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an un-analyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vairfurred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-tom wreath. A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters.
Desire | Impression | Time |
We have accepted the watertight compartments of society, the fragmentation of living as factual and necessary. We live in relationship to these fragments and accept the internalized divisions—the various roles we play, the contradictory value systems, the opposing motives and priorities—as reality. We are at odds with ourselves internally; we believe that the inner is fundamentally different from the outer, that what is me is quite separate from the not-me, that divisions among people and nations are necessary, and yet we wonder why there are tensions, conflicts, wars in the world. The conflicts begin with minds that believe in fragmentation and are ignorant of wholeness.
Acceptance | Action | Awareness | Culture | Desire | Meaning | Passion | Peace | Problems | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Service | Society | Will | Society | Awareness |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate , I thought, returning again to my original enquiry into what state of mind is propitious for creative work, because the mind of an artist, in order to achieve to the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare's mind, I conjectured, looking at the book which lay open at Antony and Cleopatra. There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
Advice | Desire | Discontent | Good | Happy | Sense | Worth |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such- be it so; but I love, and how could I feel love if I did not live, and if others did not live, and then, if we live, t
Better | Confidence | Desire | Enough | Hope | Life | Life | Money | Need | Passion | Time | Will | Work | Trouble | Learn | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.
Anger | Belief | Desire | Knowing | Love | Mind | Nothing | Passion | Peace | Truth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
Church | Desire | Knowledge | Love | Man | Nothing | Passion | Truth | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work, - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
Desire | Man | Nothing | Passion | Rage | Sense | Happiness |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
Desire |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.
Desire |