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
He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
An old Russian lady who has for some obscure reason begged me not to divulge her name, happened to show me in Paris the diary she had kept in the past. .... I cannot see any real necessity of complying with her anonymity. That she will ever read this book seems wildly improbable. Her name was and is Olga Olegovna Orlova — an egg-like alliteration which it would have been a pity to withhold. Her dry account cannot convey to the untraveled reader the implied delights of a winter day such as she describes in St. Petersburg; the pure luxury of a cloudless sky designed not to warm the flesh, but solely to please the eye; the sheen of sledge-cuts on the hard-beaten snow of spacious streets with a tawny tinge about the middle tracks due to a rich mixture of horse-dung; the brightly colored bunch of toy-balloons hawked by an aproned pedlar; the soft curve of a cupola, its gold dimmed by the bloom of powdery frost; the birch trees in the public gardens, every tiniest twig outlined white; the rasp and twinkle of winter traffic… and by the way how queer it is when you look at an old picture postcard (like the one I have placed on my desk to keep the child of memory amused for the moment) to consider the haphazard way Russian cabs had of turning whenever they liked, anywhere and anyhow, so that instead of the straight , self-conscious stream of modern traffic one sees — on this painted photograph — a dream-wide street with droshkies all awry under incredibly blue skies, which farther away, melt automatically into a pink flush of mnemonic banality.
Present |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade -- demons placed there only to show they have been booted out. Actually, I'm a mild old gentleman who loathes cruelty.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
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.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books
Taste |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
You couldn't get more original than Laura. Laura. Yes, she was an original, all right. One of a kind. Did they break her mold or what, pal? Or...or did it self-destruct? Still, Laura. The one and the only. Such a plain name for a unique cutie. But perhaps my acuity is not without its problems. I ruin everything: a stupid story to be tapped out on my tomb's stone. I ruined even Laura. And an original ruin is rare. Just ask the archaeologist, Egypt, again? Just ask me, Laura, again? and we'll both respond: Yes, again and again. And again.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Complacency is a coin by the aid of which all the world can, for want of essential means, pay its club bill in society. - It is necessary, however, that it may lose nothing of its merits, to associate judgment and prudence with it.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
That sovereign is a tyrant who knows no law but his own caprice.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The passions are the winds that fill the sails of the vessel. - They sink it at times; but without them it would be impossible to make way. - Many things that are dangerous here below, are still necessary.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
Kill |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.
Kill |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I've seen more trouble come from long engagements than from any other forms of human folly.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It’s on the field, it’s on the pane, it’s in the sky — beauty; and I can’t get at it; I can’t have it — I, she seemed to add, with that little clutch of the hand which was so characteristic, who adore it so passionately, would give the whole world to possess it!
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.