This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The blue sun in his red cockade walked the United States today, taller than any eye could see, older than any man could be. He caught the flags and the picket-lines of people, round the auto-works.
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The A B C of being, the ruddy temper, the hammer of red and blue, the hard sound steel against intimation the sharp flash, the vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.
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Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens, when I have no engagements written on my block, when no one comes to disturb my inward peace, when no one comes to take me away from myself and turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle, a broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection, being so contrived that it takes too long a time to get myself back to myself when they have gone.
Body | Church | Destroy | Esteem | Kill | Nothing | Thought | Thought |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.
Better | Bourgeoisie | Brutality | Church | Gold | Government | Haste | Lesson | Means | Order | People | Principles | Property | Sense | Struggle | Sympathy | Wealth | Will | Work | Government | Think |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
Fastidiousness | Means | Pride | Unique | Talent |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent, all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell againand oh, no, Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azureall would be shattered.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Because I threw our look with a gray question mark in your eyes. Oh, no, no empeces again (incredulity, exasperation). Well never dignabas to believe that I could feel the desire, without specific intent-to sink my face in your plaid skirt, my love. The fragility of your bare arms ... How I longed to wrap those arms, and your four limpid lovely-curled-a colt, and take your head between my unworthy hands and stretch the skin back from your temples and slanted eyes and kiss your ... Please leave me alone, will you?, You said. My God, leave me alone. And I got up from the floor while you looked twitching his face in a deliberate imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am a miserable, no matter, continue with my miserable story.
Benevolence | Courtesy | Failure | Failure |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The shock of her death froze something in me. The child I loved, was gone, but I kept looking for her - long after I had left my own childhood behind. The poison was in the wound, you see. And the wound wouldn't heal.
Future | Life | Life | Man | Posterity | Sense | Tenderness | Will |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
God has punished the knave, and the devil has drowned the rest.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Superstition: Any practice or form of religion to which we are not accustomed. Any worship that is not offered up to the true God is false and superstitious. The only true God is the God of our ; the only true worship is that which seems the most fitting to them; and to which they have accustomed us from our earliest childhood; any other worship is clearly superstitious, false, and even ridiculous.
The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.
I feel that adolescence has served its purpose when a person arrives at adulthood with a strong sense of self-esteem, the ability to relate intimately, to communicate congruently, to take responsibility, and to take risks. The end of adolescence is the beginning of adulthood. What hasn't been finished then will have to be finished later.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Her soliloquy crystallized itself into little fragmentary phrases emerging suddenly from the turbulence of her thought, particularly when she had to exert herself in any way, either to move, to count money, or to choose a turning. To know the truth--to accept without bitterness-- those, perhaps, were the most articulate of her utterances, for no one could have made head or tail of the queer gibberish murmured in front of the statue of Francis, Duke of Bedford...
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
In the Queen's prayerbook, along with the blood-stain, was also a lock of hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now added to these keepsakes a flake of tobacco, and so, reading and smoking, was moved by the humane jumble of them all--the hair, the pastry, the blood-stain, the tobacco--to such a mood of contemplation as gave her a reverent air suitable in the circumstances, though she had, it is said, no traffic with the usual God.
Art | Books | Literature | Little | Space | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Work | Writing | Art |