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
Words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging hither and dither falling in love, meeting together. It's true they are much less bound by ceremony, convention, than we are. Royal words meet with common words. English words marry French words, German words. Indian words, Negro words.
Change | Good | Hate | Merit | Will | Words | Worth | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
Abiding happiness and peace is theirs who choose goodness for its own sake - without expectation of any reward.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning - wonderful words.
Words |
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
Let us be such as help the life of the future
Words |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Submit to me. So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen alseep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.
Edward was always a good listener, since his own form of self-expression then consisted in making unearthly and to me quite meaningless sounds on his small violin. I remember him, at the age of seven, as a rather solemn, brown-eyed little boy, with beautiful arched eyebrows which lately, to my infinite satisfaction, have begun to reproduce themselves, a pair of delicate question-marks, above the dark eyes of my five-year-old son. Even in childhood we seldom quarreled, and by the time that we both went away to boarding-school he had already become the dearest companion of those brief years of unshadowed adolescence permitted to our condemned generation.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.
Vicki Baum, fully Hedwig "Vicki" Baum
Worries are the most stubborn habits in the world. Even after a poor man has won a huge lottery prize, he will still for months wake up in the night with a start, worrying about food and rent.
For, to make deserts, God, who rules mankind, Begins with kings, and ends the work by wind.
Words |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The mercy we need is self-mercy, which consists of ceasing to behave badly while justifying it.
Acceptance | Agony | Contentment | Man | Noise | People | Quiet | Words | Wrong | Value |
It would have been difficult to say what was the nature of this look, and whence proceeded the flame that flashed from it. It was a fixed gaze, which was, nevertheless, full of trouble and tumult. And, from the profound immobility of his whole body, barely agitated at intervals by an involuntary shiver, as a tree is moved by the wind; from the stiffness of his elbows, more marble than the balustrade on which they leaned; or the sight of the petrified smile which contracted his face,— one would have said that nothing living was left about Claude Frollo except his eyes.
To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.
Those men to whom their gray hairs are a constant warning, and whose time is growing short, have tasks to finish, testaments of the mind, so to speak. They may be suddenly interrupted by the coming of the end, and they have not a day to lose; hence arises the stern necessity of retirement and solitude. Man has duties to fulfill toward his thoughts.