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
Who knows who we are, how we feel? Who knows, even when intimate perception if that was the knowledge? Is not that miss things once trying to express? I do not say more with silence? At least at that moment seemed an extraordinary fruitfulness. Scooped a dimple in the sand and then cover it as a sign that there buried perfection of that moment. It was like a bit of silver in the sink and illuminate your darkness past.
Heart |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Wind and storm colored July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other, painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert.
Beauty | Freedom | Heart | Power | Universe | World | Beauty |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.
Consideration | Dirty | Truth | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
Heart |
For our own part, we respect certain things belonging to the past and forgive all of it, provided it consents to stay dead. But it if tries to come alive we attack and seek to kill it.
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
Whence come the powerful impression that is made upon us by the tomb? Are a few grains of dust deserving of our veneration? Certainly not; we respect the ashes of our ancestors for this reason only--because a secret voice whispers to us that all is not extinguished in them. It is this that confers a sacred character on the funeral ceremony among all the nations of the globe; all are alike persuaded that the sleep, even of the tomb, is not everlasting, and that death is but a glorious transfiguration.
A thing that smoked and clacked along on the Seine, making the noise of a swimming dog, came and went beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal to the Pont Louis XV; it was a machine of little value, a kind of toy, the daydream of a visionary, a utopia -- a steamboat. The Parisians regarded the useless thing with indifference.
He was experiencing what the earth may experience at the moment when it is opened by the plow so wheat may be sown; it feels only the wound; the thrill of the seed and joy of the fruit do not come until later.
He therefore turned to mankind only with regret. His cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with marble figures of kings, saints and bishops who at least did not laugh in his face and looked at him with only tranquility and benevolence. The other statues, those of monsters and demons, had no hatred for him – he resembled them too closely for that. It was rather the rest of mankind that they jeered at. The saints were his friends and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and kept watch over him. He would sometimes spend whole hours crouched before one of the statues in solitary conversation with it. If anyone came upon him then he would run away like a lover surprised during a serenade.