This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Books of quotations are an elemental model of how culture is perpetuated, the wisdom of the tribe passed on to posterity, to be added to, edited, and modified by subsequent generations.
Dorothy Parker, born Dorothy Rothschild
I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound - if I can remember any of the damn things.
Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas
Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything.
Poetry | Quotations |
Robert Byrne, fully Robert Leo Byrne
Collecting quotations is an insidious, even embarrassing habit, like ragpicking or hoarding rocks or trying on other people's laundry. I got into it originally while trying to break an addiction to candy. I kicked candy and now seem to be stuck with quotations, which are attacking my brain instead of my teeth.
Addiction | Quotations |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
In headaches and in worry vaguely life leaks away, and Time will have his fancy to-morrow or to-day.
Quotations | Reading |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one reads - for Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts it back on the shelf.
But still my fancy wanders free through that which might have been.