This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
Sound | Tenderness | World |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
All of the other people have committed crimes, the Jews are the only ones who have boasted about committing them. They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not someday become deadly to the human race.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
This whole psychiatry is nothing else but a kind of microcosm of communism [...]. It would be better left to people their personal problems. For the question arises whether the problems are not the only thing in the world that people may have on the property?
Appetite | Awareness | Ceremony | Light | Reflection | Sense | Sound | Time | Awareness |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?
Sound |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man, they say.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad.
One should make good people their friends. One, who keeps good friends, benefits and lives in peace.
Deeds | Good | Intelligence | Sound | Deeds |
It is impossible for the fools to tread the path of learned ones.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Austrian public-opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sport figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high.
Beginning | Behavior | Instinct | Man | People | Tradition | Wishes | Loss |
The bull with a thousand horns who rose out of the sea, with the aid of him, the mighty one, do we put the folks to sleep.