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
It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.
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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.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
He was not afraid. At every moment Nature signified by some laughing hint like that gold spot which went round the wall--there, there, there--her determination to show, by brandishing her plumes, shaking her tresses, flinging her mantle this way and that, beautifully, always beautifully, and standing close up to breathe through her hollowed hands Shakespeare's words, her meaning.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly... Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.
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Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilizing, upon the rich soil of my imagination.
The bourgeois in their Sunday clothes, who passed by the elephant of the Bastille, often said, eyeing it scornfully with their bulging eyes, What's the use of that? Its use was to save from the cold, the frost, the hail, the rain, to protect from the wintry wind, to spare from sleeping in the mud, which breeds fever and from sleeping in the snow, which breeds death, a little being with no father or mother, with no bread, no clothing, no sanctuary. Its use was to receive the innocent whom society repelled....This idea of Napoleon's, disdained by men, had been taken up by God. What had been merely illustrious had become august...The emperor had a dream of genius; in this titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, brandishing his trunk, bearing his tower and making the joyous and vivifying waters gush out on all sides around him, he wanted to incarnate the people. God had done a grander thing with it, he sheltered a child.
Do not lay the blame on Godhead, as you are prone to do. When everything goes right you say that God has come close to you; when something goes wrong you say that God has deserted you and gone far away. He does not move far or near.
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O camel-like mind, you were once very pure; the filth of egotism has now attached itself to you.
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Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live.
Argument | Chance | Courage | Fighting | Kill | Man | Manliness | Men | Need | Organization | People | Purpose | Purpose | Worth | Old | Think |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work -- his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy -- and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.
Kill | Men | Organization | Purpose | Purpose |
Stealing the wealth of others, coveting another man’s wife and doubting the integrity and character of friends - these three lead to one’s destruction.
Consequences | Kill | People | Wealth | Will |
Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
Then the music strikes up, and freely they pardon the offences and faults of the enemy, and after the victories they are kind to them, if it has been decreed that they should destroy the walls of the enemy's city and take their lives.
Action | Boys | Change | Destroy | Hunger | Kill | Nature | People | Science | Thinking | Old |
Tom Lehrer, fully Thomas Andrew Lehrer
A few years ago, a motion picture version appeared of Sophocles' immortal tragedy "Oedipus Rex". This picture played only in the so-called art theaters, and it was not a financial success. And I maintain that the reason it was not a financial success... you're way ahead of me... was that it did not have a title tune which the people could hum, and which would make them actually eager to attend this particular...flick. So, I've attempted to supply this, and here then is the prospective title song from "Oedipus Rex".
What a man is at seven is also what he is at seventy. (Used when expressing dissatisfaction in unchanged human behavior or the fact that one never learns from one's mistakes.)