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
How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs color like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet.
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 I could believe, said Rhoda, that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should be rid of my fear: nothing persists. One moment does not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps. You do not see me come... I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces. I have no end in view. I do not know how to run minute to minute, and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass that you call life. Because you have an end in view--one person, is it, to sit beside, an idea is it, your beauty is it? I do not know--your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green of forest rides to a hound running in the scent.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.
Deeds | Ends | Family | Land | Lying | Man | Memory | Need | Work | Deeds |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.
Ends | Enough | Light | Play | Reading | Will | Work | Old |
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
A thousand people cannot convince one by words to the extent that one person can convince a thousand by action.
Dedication | Fortune | Good | Government | Law | Work | Government |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Roman, remember that you shall rule the nations by your authority, for this is to be your skill, to make peace the custom, to spare the conquered, and to wage war until the haughty are brought low.
Work |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
On Monday you were cruel and on Tuesday you said you were sorry. But on Wednesday you did it again, which means I’m not going to believe anything you say on Thursday.
Do you think that Dante has fewer things to say than Machiavelli? Is the underworld of civilization, because it is deeper and gloomier, less important than the upper? Do we really know the mountain when we do not know the cavern?