This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"I am not yours, nor lost in you, not lost, although I long to be. Lost as a candle lit at noon, lost as a snowflake in the sea. You love me, and I find you still a spirit beautiful and bright, yet I am I, who long to be lost as a light is lost in light. " - Sara Teasdale, born Sara Trevor Teasdale, aka Sara Teasdale Filsinger
"And even if this world burns up hidden harps will still play here." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"Work. Keep digging your well. Don't think about getting off from work. Water is there somewhere. Submit to daily practice. Your loyalty to that is a ring at the door. Keep knocking, and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look out to see who's there." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"The human soul has need of both personal property and collective property. Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely someday that its infliction was just. This reintegration with the good is what punishment is. Every man who is innocent, or who has finally expiated guilt, needs to be recognized as honourable to the same extent as anyone else." - Simone Weil
"No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it...To myself, personally, it brings nothing but increasing drudgery and daily loss of friends." - Thomas Jefferson
"Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time; which explains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contained between my hat and my boots," - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"He seemed to those about him as one listening to a voice, silent for other men." - Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
"I hope we don't lose in America this demand that those of us who want this office must be prepared not to handle the 10-second gimmick that deals, say, with little things like war and peace." - Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
"For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is L. The suffix -ita has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy L and a long o. No, the first syllable should be as in lollipop, the L liquid and delicate, the lee not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in Dolores. My little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname Haze, where Irish mists blend with a German bunny—I mean, a small German hare." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellow-ly blurred, illusive, lost." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"In a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"The further I get from the things that I care about, the less I care about how much further away I get." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of categories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous! God granted it." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"She was a fly, but the others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects, dancing, fluttering, skimming, while she alone dragged herself up out of the saucer." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"The human body might well be regarded as only an appearance. It hides our reality. It lies thick over our light, or our shadow. The reality is our soul. To speak absolutely, the human visage is a mask. The true man is that which is beneath man." - Victor Hugo
"Amoebae leave no fossils. They haven't any bones. (No teeth, no belt buckles, no wedding rings.) It is impossible, therefore, to determine how long amoebae have been on Earth." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"On the poor use of grammar it's a matter of usage. If a house is off-plumb and rickety and lets in the wind, you blame the mason, not the bricks. Our words are up to the job. It's our syntax that's limiting." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"He was, and is yet, most likely, the wearisomest, self-righteous pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself, and fling the curses on his neighbors." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"Only two pointed arrows betrayal of violence is similar to injure users of worse enemies." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"Devotions are the discipline of being quiet and listening for what we donÂ’t hear in the streets, in the media, in the workplace." - Eugene Peterson