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
But was one of those women who combine beauty with health ?zawliwo?ci? hysterical, lyrical outbursts of very practical, trivial thinking, vile nature of sentimentality, sluggish inactivity of sober ability to send others in search of the wind in the field.
Sadness |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Kay Arr, said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say Kay Arr close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvelous discovery indeed - that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life!
Contemplation | Control | Decision | Father | Inclination | Light | Mother | Position | Qualities | Quiet | Sadness | Spirit | Parting | Contemplation | Old |
BERNARDO: It was about to speak when the cock crew. HORATIO: And then it started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons.
Sadness |
One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.
This thoroughly 'pragmatic' view of religion has usually been taken as a matter of course by common men. They have interpolated divine miracles into the field of nature, they have built a heaven out beyond the grave. It is only transcendentalist metaphysicians who think that, without adding any concrete details to Nature, or subtracting any, but by simply calling it the expression of absolute spirit, you make it more divine just as it stands. I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the deeper way. It gives it body as well as soul, it makes it claim, as everything real must claim, some characteristic realm of fact as its very own. What the more characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of energy in the faith-state and the prayer-state, I know not. But the over-belief on which I am ready to make my personal venture is that they exist. The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true. I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist's attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word 'bosh!' Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow 'scientific' bounds. Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament — more intricately built than physical science allows. So my objective and my subjective conscience both hold me to the over-belief which I express. Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?
Death | Evil | Fate | Gloom | Heart | Knowledge | Life | Life | Power | Present | Sadness | Thought | Will | Fate | Old | Thought |
The patron god of children born on Thursdays is Shiva the Destroyer, and that the day has two guiding animal spirits--the lion and the tiger. The official tree of children born on Thursday is the banyan. The official bird is the peacock. A person born on Thursday is always talking first, interrupting everyone else, can be a little aggressive, tends to be handsome (a playboy or playgirl, in Ketut's words) but has a decent overall character, with an excellent memory and a desire to help other people.
So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria da Michele, and these pies we have just ordered -- one for each of us -- are making us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delerium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie is practically in tears over hers, she's having a metaphysical crisis about it, she's begging me, Why do they even bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm?
Sadness |
So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are correct, but in only one respect - only if they happen to be talking about Judaism. Christianity simply does not share that deep and consistent historical reverence toward matrimony. Lately it has, yes- but not originally. For the first thousand or so years of Christian history, the church regarded monogamous marriage as marginally less wicked that flat-out whoring but only very marginally.
Care | Death | Depression | Friend | Lending | Life | Life | Loneliness | Love | Mind | Mistake | Need | Nothing | Office | Reason | Reflection | Sadness | Security | Time | Waiting | Will | Writing |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).
Darkness | Death | Defeat | Earth | Failure | Hope | Life | Life | Light | Love | Mystery | Nothing | Power | Reading | Sadness | Will | Failure |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
Sadness |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying I must read that, too, when I've the time, replace it and continue the search.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
She seemed to say "Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?" That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, this magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty."