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
He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship -- it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out.
Loneliness | Lying | Truth | Waste | Old |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
Church | Desire | Knowledge | Love | Man | Nothing | Passion | Truth | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not – Heaven help us – all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit?
Destroy | Dreams | Earth | Life | Life | Man | Soul | Style | Truth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
Truth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.
Truth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share.
Truth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn...
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.
Truth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
Suffer no anxiety, for he who is a sufferer of anxiety becomes regardless of enjoyment of the world and the spirit, and contraction happens to his body and soul.
Agony | Conscience | Deeds | Judgment | Soul | Truth | Deeds |
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
Turn yourself not away from three best things: Good Thought, Good Word, and Good Deed.
Truth |
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.
Truth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
Truth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
To upset everything every 3 or 4 years is my notion of a happy life.
Truth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour--landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard... But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants?
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.
Consideration | Dirty | Truth | Think |