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
Math anxiety: an intense lifelong fear of two trains approaching each other at speeds of 60 and 80 MPH.
Books | Conspiracy | Literature | Nonsense | Nothing | Reading | Suspicion | Taste |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?
Design | Example | Habit | Impossibility | Reading | Search | War |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
What is called happiness is an abstract idea, composed of various ideas of pleasure; for he who has but a moment of pleasure is not a happy man, in like manner that a moment of grief constitutes not a miserable one.
Enthusiasm | God | Heaven | Law | Man | Reading | Spirit | God |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
It isn't an easy job to paint oneself – at any rate if it is to be different from a photograph. And you see – this, in my opinion, is the advantage that impressionism possesses over all the other things; it is not banal, and one seeks after a deeper resemblance than the photograph.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.
Beauty | Day | Ends | Husband | Mind | Praise | Reading | Time | Beauty | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
In this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow. (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house and grounds)
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.
Absolute | Cleanliness | Contemplation | Love | Means | Men | Reading | System | Woman | Words | World | Contemplation |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.
Ends | Enough | Light | Play | Reading | Will | Work | Old |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
You have neither wife nor child (without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness).
Books | Impetuosity | Reading | Will | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life.