This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Land |
We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
The more you see yourself as what you'd like to become, and act as if what you want is already there, the more you'll activate those dormant forces that will collaborate to transform your dream into your reality.
Achievement | Failure | Greatness | Learning | People | Teach | Failure |
Monsanto doesn't care about feeding the world. We have to think about the wage slavery of migrant workers and salary slavery of those who are desperately unhappy.
Ability | Diversion | Energy | Heart | Marriage | Nothing | Rights | System | Television | Wife | Will | Work | Negotiation | Understand |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Without a revolutionary theory there cannot be a revolutionary movement.
Ideas | Literature | Power |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action.
Better | Machines | Order | People | Society | Will | Work | Society |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as? I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of categories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw.
Character | Conscience | Emotions | Family | History | Individual | Magic | Mind | Work | World |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Commonsense has trampled down many a gentle genius whose eyes had delighted in a too early moonbeam of some too early truth; commonsense has back-kicked dirt at the loveliest of queer paintings because a blue tree seemed madness to it's well-meaning hoof; commonsense has prompted ugly but strong nations to crush their fair but frail neighbors the moment a gap in history offered a chance that it would have been ridiculous not to exploit.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
World |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is L. The suffix -ita has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy L and a long o. No, the first syllable should be as in lollipop, the L liquid and delicate, the lee not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in Dolores. My little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname Haze, where Irish mists blend with a German bunny—I mean, a small German hare.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
A company of solemn tyrants is impervious to all seductions.
Work |