This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.
Memory |
In one of his traditional sermons transmitted by his disciples, is the following apologue on the subject of charity: When God created the earth it shook and trembled, until he put mountains upon it, to make it firm. Then the angels asked, ' O God, is there anything of thy creation stronger than these mountains? ' And God replied, ' Iron is stronger than the mountains; for it breaks them.' 'And is there anything of thy creation stronger than iron ? ' 'Yes ; fire is stronger than iron, for it melts it.' 'Is there anything of thy creation stronger than fire?' 'Yes; water, for it quenches fire.' 'O Lord, is there anything of thy creation stronger than water ? ' ' Yes, wind; for it overcomes water and puts it in motion.' 'O, our Sustainer! is there anything of thy creation stronger than wind ? ' ' Yes, a good man giving alms ; if he give with his right hand and conceal it from his left, he overcomes all things.'
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Say this city has ten million souls, some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
Memory |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
She was my North, my South, my East and West my working week and my Sunday rest, my noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
Memory |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Cancer is a curious thing... Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it's like some hidden assassin, waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire.
Body | Death | Man | Memory | Mind | Mourning | Silence | Words | Happiness |
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
In every big city there is always one surefire laugh, and that lies in hanging some piece of idiocy upon the people of a nearby city or town.
Memory |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust
Awakening | Consciousness | Memory | Perception |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an American businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.
Day | Gold | Luxury | Memory | Necessity | Pity | Public | Reason | Will | Child | Old |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The answer to all questions of life and death, the absolute solution was written all over the world he had known: it was like a traveler realizing that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as that of one's father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language... Thus the traveler spells the landscape and its sense is disclosed, and likewise, the intricate pattern of human life turns out to be monogrammatic, now quite clear to the inner eye disentangling the interwoven letters. And the word, the meaning which appears is astounding in its simplicity: the greatest surprise being perhaps that in the course of one's earthly existence, with one's brain encompassed by an iron ring, by the close-fitting dream of one's own personality - one had not made by chance that simple mental jerk, which would have set free imprisoned thought and granted it the great understanding.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Speaking of novels,’ I said, ‘you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust’s rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described—by Cocteau, I think—as a mirage of suspended gardens, and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski’s (and Lyovin’s) thick neck, and a cupid’s buttocks for cheeks; but—and now let me finish sweetly—we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking human interest: it is there, it is there—maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
In a sense I'm glad that I've never learned how to paint.
Memory |
In Paris, you learn wit, in London you learn to crush your social rivals, and in Florence you learn poise.
Memory |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.