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
She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was.
Past |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She felt drawing further from her and further from her an Archduke, (she did not mind that) a fortune, (she did not mind that) the safety and circumstance of married life, (she did not mind that) but life she heard going from her, and a lover.
Past |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.
Belief | Body | Children | Courage | Determination | Effort | Freedom | Habit | Life | Life | Little | Men | Need | Opportunity | Past | Poverty | Power | Reality | Talking | Will | World | Worth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
Giving | Past | Sense | Simplicity |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
What is more irritating than to see one’s subject, on whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one’s grasp altogether and indulging — witness her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her palings, her eyes now bright as lamps, now haggard as dawns — what is more humiliating than to see all this dumb show of emotion and excitement gone through before our eyes when we know that what causes it — thought and imagination — are of no importance whatsoever?
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.
Beauty | Better | Books | Children | Enough | Hate | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Nothing | Past | People | Sorrow | Beauty | Friends |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
There's just this… an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined.
Art | Better | Books | Criticism | Enough | Future | History | Hope | Means | Money | Past | Philosophy | Poetry | Research | Thought | Will | Art | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
I'm looking for facts first, but it was probably caused by extra water in the hull, ... I think people are not aware the dangers of a boat's wake.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Living from the outer to the inner; that means that you have roving eyes and alert ears to look out at the panorama of society and wonder and hope and contrive to try to get something from the outer that will satisfy the inner.
Experience | Past | Present |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Realize that truth disturbs in order to cure.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
There is only one tyrant in life, which is a lack of understanding of life.
Experience | Illusion | Man | Past | Right | Will | World | Think |
That history has to be re-made is evident. Up to the present time, it has been nearly always written from the miserable point of view of accomplished fact; it is time to write it from the point of view of principle.
Past |
So long as man is a child, God wills him to be innocent.
Appearance | Contempt | Conversation | Ends | Past | Pity | Old |
What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.