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
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.
Beauty | Imagination | Means | Men | Soul | Thought | World | Beauty | Old | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
Battle | Birth | Children | History | Imagination | Life | Life | Longing | Majority | Meaning | Men | Nothing | Talking | Thought | Will | Old | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
Excitement | Imagination | Thought | Time | Witness | Thought |
Intolerance is to be found even among philosophers, and censorship even among democrats.
Imagination | Memory |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. 'I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,' she told me. 'In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.' Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, 'This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.' Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. 'I often talk to this tree,' she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. 'Yes.' What did it say to her? She answered, 'It said to me, I am here--I am here--I am life, eternal life.'
Desolation | Existence | Imagination | Important | Life | Life | Memory | Mind | Past | Poverty | Spirit | World |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.
Imagination | World |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point.
Doubt | Imagination |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
As you can see, arenas, an act is not, as young people often think, like a stone, someone lifts and throws, and it succeeds or fails, that's all. When you lift this rock, the earth becomes lighter and hand to bear it becomes heavier. When you fly, the circuits of the stars respond, and where hit or falls the universe is changed. With each act of compromising the overall balance. The winds and seas, the forces of water, soil and light, animals and plants, and everything they do is good and correct us make. Because all of them act in the balance. Since the hurricane and the blare of the great whales, until the dried drop one sex and the flying gnats: it's all done with a view to balance the total. But we, to the extent that we have dominion over the universe and the one over the other, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do by their nature. We must learn to maintain balance. Once you have intelligence, you should not act out of ignorance. After you have choices, you should not behave irresponsibly.
Children | Imagination |
V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
Most comic writers like to think they could play it straight if only their public would let them. Waugh is able to be grave without difficulty for he has always been comic for serious reasons. He has his own, almost romantic sense of propriety.
Awe | Imagination | Mind | Society | Society |
Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
The only possibility of reform in Los Angeles, which is a 'see no, hear no evil' city, is if there is the glaring eye of outside investigators from Sacramento and from Washington D.C.,
Imagination | Thought | Thought |
I will not go so far as to say that the improvement of taste and of virtue is the same, or that they may always be expected to co-exist in an equal degree. More powerful correctives than taste can apply are necessary for reforming the corrupt propensities which too frequently prevail among mankind. Elegant speculations are sometimes found to float on the surface of the mind while bad passions possess the interior regions of the heart. At the same time, this cannot but be admitted, that the exercise of taste is, in its native tendency, moral and purifying.
Character | Imagination | Style |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection–not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose their monkey fur, from the elements. Eventually, they started transposing their hunting fantasies onto cave walls in the form of pictures, first as an attempt at practical magic and later for the strange, unexpected pleasure they discovered in artistic creation. Time passed. Art came off the walls and turned into ritual. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present mindless, voracious trajectory, could land those of us lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again.
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
On the campus of Outlaw College, professors of essential insanities would characterize the conflicting attitudes of Nina Jablonski and Leigh-Cheri as indicative of a general conflict between social idealism and romanticism. As any of the learned professors would explain, plied with sufficient tequila, no matter how fervently a romantic might support a movement, he or she eventually must withdraw from active participation in that movement because the group ethic - the supremacy of the organization over the individual - is an affront to intimacy. Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars with which this life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities.
Capacity | Imagination | Observation | People | Will | World |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
I've sucked way too much cement for this year. Bad juju rising off them city sidewalks. I need to babble with a brook or two, inhale starlight, make friends with some trees.
Imagination | Men | People |
Alas! sir, In what have I offended you? What cause Hath my behaviour given to your displeasure? The Life of King Henry the Eighth (Queen Katharine at II, iv)
Alas, sir, how fell you besides your five wits? MALVOLIO: Fool, there was never a man so notoriously abused. I am as well in my wits, fool, as thou art. FESTE: But as well? Then you are mad indeed, if you be no better in your wits than a fool. Twelfth Night, Act iv, Scene 2
And now this pale swan in her watery nest begins the sad dirge of her certain ending.
And as the butcher takes away the calf and binds the wretch and beats it when it strains, bearing it to the bloody slaughterhouse, even so remorseless have they borne him hence; and as the dam runs lowing up and down, looking the way her harmless young one went, and can do naught but wail her darling's loss, even so myself bewails good Gloucester's case with said unhelpful tears, and with dimmed eyes Look after him and cannot do him good, So mighty are his vowed enemies. His fortunes I will weep, and 'twixt each groan Say 'Who's a traitor? Gloucester he is none.' King Henry VI, Part II, Act iii
Imagination | Nothing |