This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, be not afraid of my body." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, no sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest. Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! Whoever degrades another degrades me, and whatever is done or said returns at last to me. Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the words I have read in my life." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding me by the hand… Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am silent, I require nothing further, I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity beyond the grave, but I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied, he ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Anyone who thinks that carrying out some limited observance that he learned earlier on and who looks no further ahead who remains content with this will largely halt his own spiritual development... a noble and skilled apprentice who makes no further progress at all must be either dull-witted or perverse." - Walter Hilton
"Some people understand the charity of our Lord and are saved by it; others, relying on this mercy and kindness, continue in their sins, thinking that it may be theirs whenever they wish. But this is not so, for then they are too late and are taken in their sins before they expect it, and so damn themselves." - Walter Hilton
"The emotion of love, in spite of the romantics, is not self-sustaining it endures only when the lovers love many things together, and not merely each other." - Walter Lippmann
"No good writer was ever long neglected; no great man overlooked by men equally great. Impatience is a proof of inferior strength, and a destroyer of what little there may be." - Walter Savage Landor
"When she kissed me once in a play, rubies were less bright than they; and less bright were those which shone in the palace of the Sun. Will they be as bright again? Not if kiss'd by other men." - Walter Savage Landor
"A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day." - Washington Irving
"Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You're never as good as you'd like to be. So there's always something to hope for." - Washington Irving
"Young lawyers attend the courts not because they have business there but because they have no business anywhere else." - Washington Irving
"A naked lad will play, a starving lad will not." - Welsh Proverbs
"A slattern woman hold open the door to hell." - Welsh Proverbs
"A spoon does not know the taste of soup, nor a learned fool the taste of wisdom." - Welsh Proverbs
"The strength of the bee its patience." - Welsh Proverbs
"By this time, the era of cut-and-run economics ought to be finished. Such an economy cannot be rationally defended or even apologized for. The proofs of its immense folly, heartlessness, and destructiveness are everywhere. Its failure as a way of dealing with the natural world and human society can no longer be sanely denied. That this economic system persists and grows larger and stronger in spite of its evident failure has nothing to do with rationality or, for that matter, with evidence. It persists because, embodied now in multinational corporations, it has discovered a terrifying truth: If you can control a people’s economy, you don’t need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant. If you control people’s choices as to whether or not they will work, and where they will work, and what they will do, and how well they will do it, and what they will eat and wear, and the genetic makeup of their crops and animals, and what they will do for amusement, then why should you worry about freedom of speech? In a totalitarian economy, any "political liberties" that the people might retain would simply cease to matter. If, as is often the case already, nobody can be elected who is not wealthy, and if nobody can be wealthy without dependence on the corporate economy, then what is your vote worth? The citizen thus becomes an economic subject." - Wendell Berry
"Sit and be still until in the time of no rain you hear beneath the dry wind's commotion in the trees the sound of flowing water among the rocks, a stream unheard before, and you are where breathing is prayer." - Wendell Berry
"The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life." - Wendell Berry
"The world is whole beyond human knowing." - Wendell Berry
"To save myself, I would try to summon up a vision of Mattie, but I could not see her. I could not imagine her. Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone." - Wendell Berry
"Open your heart and take us in, love-love and me." - William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley
"The word 'Intellectual' suggests straight away - A man who's untrue to his wife" - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Abstaining is favorable both to the head and the pocket." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
"I'd rather have two girls at 21 each than one girl at 42." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
"The growing spirit of kindliness and reconciliation between the North and South after the frightful differences of a generation ago ought to be a source of deep congratulation to all, and especially to those whose mistreatment caused the war; but if that reconciliation is to be marked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same black men, with permanent legislation into a position of inferiority, then those black men, if they are really men, are called upon by every consideration of patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a course by all civilized methods, even though such opposition involves disagreement with Mr. Booker T. Washington. We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"Then, as the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and turned his closed eyes toward the Sea. And the world whistled in his ears." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself -- ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide." - Walker Percy
"Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. It is that one finding oneself in one of life's critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways. No. One may simply default. Pass. Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one's heel and leave. Exit. Why after all need one act humanly?" - Walker Percy
"Description is revelation. It is not the thing described, nor false facsimile. It is an artificial thing that exists, in its own seeming, plainly visible, yet not too closely the double of our lives, intenser than any actual life could be." - Wallace Stevens
"Force is my lot and not pink-clustered roma ni avignon ni leyden, and cold, my element. Death is my master and, without light, I dwell." - Wallace Stevens
"It is not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem." - Wallace Stevens
"It needed the heavy nights of drenching weather to make him return to people, to find among them whatever it was that he found in their absence, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation." - Wallace Stevens
"The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud. Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks him in New Haven with an eye that does not look beyond the object." - Wallace Stevens
"The heavy trees, the grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, the nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines deepen the feelings to inhuman depths." - Wallace Stevens
"Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes)." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"A little downy girl still wearing poppies still eating popcorn in the colored gloam where tawny Indians took paid croppers because you stole her from her wax-browed and dignified protector spitting into his heavy-lidded eye ripping his flavid toga and at dawn leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort the awfulness of love and violets remorse despair while you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away because of all you did because of all I did not you have to die" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"A minister of state is excusable for the harm he does when the helm of government has forced his hand in a storm; but in the calm he is guilty of all the good he does not do." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Oh, Theo, why should I change — I used to be very passive and very gentle and quiet — I'm that no longer, but then I'm no longer a child either now — sometimes I feel my own man." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life" - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"All looked distant and peaceful and strange. The shore seemed refined, far away, unreal. Already the little distance they had sailed had put them far from it and given it the changed look, the composed look, of something receding in which one has no longer any part." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"As for describing the smell of a spaniel mixed with the smell of torches, laurels, incense, banners, wax candles and a garland of rose leaves crushed by a satin heel that has been laid up in camphor, perhaps Shakespeare, had he paused in the middle of writing Antony and Cleopatra — But Shakespeare did not pause. Confessing our inadequacy, then, we can but note that to Flush Italy, in these the fullest, the freest, the happiest years of his life, meant mainly a succession of smells. Love, it must be supposed, was gradually losing its appeal. Smell remained. Now that they were established in Casa Guidi again, all had their avocations. Mr. Browning wrote regularly in one room; Mrs. Browning wrote regularly in another. The baby played in the nursery. But Flush wandered off into the streets of Florence to enjoy the rapture of smell. He threaded his path through main streets and back streets, through squares and alleys, by smell. He nosed his way from smell to smell; the rough, the smooth, the dark, the golden. He went in and out, up and down, where they beat brass, where they bake bread, where the women sit combing their hair, where the bird-cages are piled high on the causeway, where the wine spills itself in dark red stains on the pavement, where leather smells and harness and garlic, where cloth is beaten, where vine leaves tremble, where men sit and drink and spit and dice — he ran in and out, always with his nose to the ground, drinking in the essence; or with his nose in the air vibrating with the aroma. He slept in this hot patch of sun — how sun made the stone reek! he sought that tunnel of shade — how acid shade made the stone smell! He devoured whole bunches of ripe grapes largely because of their purple smell; he chewed and spat out whatever tough relic of goat or macaroni the Italian housewife had thrown from the balcony — goat and macaroni were raucous smells, crimson smells. He followed the swooning sweetness of incense into the violet intricacies of dark cathedrals; and, sniffing, tried to lap the gold on the window- stained tomb. Nor was his sense of touch much less acute. He knew Florence in its marmoreal smoothness and in its gritty and cobbled roughness. Hoary folds of drapery, smooth fingers and feet of stone received the lick of his tongue, the quiver of his shivering snout. Upon the infinitely sensitive pads of his feet he took the clear stamp of proud Latin inscriptions. In short, he knew Florence as no human being has ever known it; as Ruskin never knew it or George Eliot either." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"As summer neared, as the evening lengthened there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind- of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of outwardly the scattered parts of the vision within. In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which cloud forever and shadows form, dreams persisted; and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if you questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumph, happiness prevails, order rules, or to resist the extra ordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity remote from the known pleasures and familiar virtues, something alien to the processes of domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand which would render the possessor secure. Moreover softened and acquiescent, the spring with their bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloud about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among passing shadows and fights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her knowledge of the sorrows of mankind." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf