This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
If you tell the truth about yourself, you can hardly tell the other people.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes -- one of the tragedies of married life.
Nonsense |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a fingerprint of a shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.
I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the breakup of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading.
Should we continue to look upwards Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds. (Les Miserables)
Soul |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaninglessness in rational terms.
O Indra, destroy all those lustful people behaving like birds.... angry ones behaving like wolves.... greedy ones behaving like vultures.... enticed ones like owls..... arrogant ones like eagles and the jealous ones behaving like dogs.
The women that lie upon couches and upon beds, and they that rest in litters, the women all that exhale sweet fragrance, do we put to sleep.
Looks |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
Regret |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
This concern, feebly called 'love of nature', seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
Born of God's Wisdom and Philosophy, keen lover of true beauty and true good, I call the vain self-traitorous multitude back to my mother's milk; for it is she, faithful to God her spouse, who nourished me, making me quick and active to intrude within the inmost veil, where I have viewed and handled all things in eternity.