This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When friends grow cold, and the converse of intimates languishes into vapid civility and commonplace, books only continue the unaltered countenance of happier days, and cheer us with that true friendship which never deceived hope nor deserted sorrow.
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
Tapping into the essence of originating Spirit, emulating the attributes of the creative force of intention, and manifesting into your life anything that you desire that's consistent with the universal mind...
The people didn't really want to be saints of self-deprivation and hatred of the world. They knew that the world would sooner or later deprive them of all it had given them, but still they liked it.
Beauty | Despair | Fear | Forethought | Grace | Life | Life | Peace | Rest | Sound | Time | Waiting | World | Beauty |
Small creatures die because larger creatures are hungry. How superior to this human confusion of greed and creed, blood and fire.
As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Defenseless under the night our world in stupor lies; yet, dotted everywhere, ironic points of light flash out wherever the Just exchange their messages: may I, composed like them of Eros and of dust, beleaguered by the same negation and despair, show an affirming flame.
Sound |
At the piano, scales, arpeggios and chords, the morning exercises, the afternoon's reading, the night's reflection, that's how to produce a virtuoso.
Sound |
A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new.
Beauty is momentary in the mind, the fitful tracing of a portal; but in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
Thus by such victory, not by machines but in oppositions to the principle to the principles of machines, has the freedom of states been preserved by the cunning of architects.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction. The purpose of this foreword is not to show that Bend Sinister belongs or does not belong to serious literature (which is a euphemism for the hollow profundity and the ever-welcome commonplace). I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: great books). I am not sincere, I am not provocative, I am not satirical. I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of thaw in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent. As in the case of my Invitation to a Beheading - with which this book has obvious affinities - automatic comparisons between Bend Sinister and Kafka's creations or Orwell's cliches would go merely to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.
Sound | Tenderness |