This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh there is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
Experience | Obscurity | Obscurity | People | Poetry |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The friends who met here and embraced are gone, each to his own mistake.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an elite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.
Poetry |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
But in my arms till break of day let the living creature lie, mortal, guilty, but to me the entirely beautiful.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Put the car away; when life fails what's the good of going to Wales? Here am I, here are you: but what does it mean? What are we going to do?
Poetry |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.
Poetry | Responsibility |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
Action | Deeds | Men | Mistake | Poetry | Time | World | Deeds |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The stately ship is seen no more, the fragile skiff attains the shore; and while the great and wise decay, and all their trophies pass away, some sudden thought, some careless rhyme, still floats above the wrecks of Time.
Age | Belief | Culture | Existence | Faith | Ideas | Imagination | Legends | Life | Life | Light | Little | Poetry | Religion | System | Time |
If sex were all, then every trembling hand could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
Just as my fingers on the keys make music, so the selfsame soul on my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound.
Poetry |
One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
Poetry |
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds, o sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon, there is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, like the clashed edges of two words that kill.
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
Within the people I love, I always seem to detect something obstinate, almost up to the cruelty. A kind of core, a flame absolute rigor, a bit like they were determined to be faithful no matter what their commitments.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper. All rose, exchanging smiles.
Consciousness | Poetry | Position | Regard | Universe |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
Poetry |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge.