This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
Abuse | Democracy | Power | Tyranny | Understand |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives, and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs. Ramsay. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr. Bankes’s glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr. Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. ‘But why different, and how different?’ she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be—Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr. Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr. Bankes saying, The vegetable salts are lost. All this she would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the window, in pretense that she must go,—it was dawn, she could see the sun rising,—half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing, insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs. Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs. Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs. Ramsay listening; shaded lights and regular breathing.
Abstract | Abuse | Beauty | Body | Control | Day | Emotions | Enough | Firmness | Heart | Learning | Nothing | Object | Play | Space | Tears | Thinking | Time | Woman | Words | Beauty | Old | Think |
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes. - The flowers fading like our hopes, the leaves falling like our years, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives - all bear secret relations to our destinies.
Abuse | Destiny | Ends | Example | Family | Future | Glory | Humility | Nothing | Search | Silence | Thought | Following | Old | Thought |
Now old desire doth in his death-bed lie, and young affection gapes to be his heir; that fair for which love groan'd for and would die, with tender Juliet match'd, is now not fair. Now Romeo is beloved and loves again, alike betwitched by the charm of looks, but to his foe supposed he must complain, and she steal love's sweet bait from fearful hooks: being held a foe, he may not have access to breathe such vows as lovers use to swear; and she as much in love, her means much less to meet her new-beloved anywhere: but passion lends them power, time means, to meet tempering extremities with extreme sweet.
Sir John stands to his word, the devil shall have his bargain; for he was never yet a breaker of proverbs: he will give the devil his due.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Did I know him? Did I love him? You ask me that? I knew him like you know nobody in the world, and I loved him like you love God.
Abuse | Little | Understand |
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above the seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him. swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep.
Abuse | Experience | Life | Life | Little | Means | Men | Problems | Suicide | Trust | Work | World | Learn |
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo?s heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering.
Abuse | Chance | Effort | Exploit | Good | Little | Office | People | Price | Right | Child |