This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music.
People | Sense | Will | Understand |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.
Father | Good | Nothing | Sense | Simplicity |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
And then she looked up and saw Flush. Something unusual in his look must have struck her. She paused. She laid down her pen. Once he had roused her with a kiss, and she thought that he was Pan. He had eaten chicken and rice pudding soaked in cream. He had given up the sunshine for her sake. She called him to her and said she forgave him.
Sense |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying that is all more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, that is all. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which s i g h s collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.
Sense | Tenderness |
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
Here we slept, she says. And he adds, Kisses without number. Waking in the morning - Silver between the trees - Upstairs - In the garden -When summer came -In winter snowtime -The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
Beginning | Determination | Future | Power | Sense | Worth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs. Ramsay’s knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs. Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored?
Sense |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
Giving | Past | Sense | Simplicity |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The critic of the opposite sex will be genuinely puzzled and surprised by an attempt to alter the current scale of values, and will see in it not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak, or trivial, or sentimental, because it differs from their own.
Beginning | Determination | Power | Sense |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Art | Experience | Man | Marriage | Mind | Sense | Woman | Art |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?