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
Man … always acts either self-loving, just for the hell of it, or God-loving, just for the heaven of it; his reasons, his appetites are secondary motivations. Man chooses either life or death, but he chooses; everything he does, from going to the toilet to mathematical speculation, is an act of religious worship, either of God or of himself.
Abstract | Body | Children | Dawn | Day | Fidelity | Hope | Insult | Love | Soul | Thinking | Time | Will | World | Insult |
Beauty is momentary in the mind, the fitful tracing of a portal; but in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
A too-fluent green suggested malice in the dry machine of ocean, pondering dank stratagem. Who then beheld the figures of the clouds like blooms secluded in the thick marine?
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, within whose burning bosom we devise our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly… Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers… Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires… Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
The wind, tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, came bluntly thundering, more terrible than the revenge of music on bassoons.
The wind speeds her, blowing upon her hands and watery back. She touches the clouds, where she goes in the circle of her traverse of the sea.
The wind shifts like this: like a human without illusions, who still feels irrational things within her.
Body |
You were created of your name, the word is that of which you were the personage. There is no life except in the word of it.
Words |
It is as if being was to be observed, as if, among the possible purposes of what one sees, the purpose that comes first, the surface, is the purpose to be seen, the property of the moon, what it evokes.
The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, it held the shivering, the shaken limbs, then bathed its body in the leaping lake.
Ideas |
It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
Child |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave. Although Lucette had never died before—no, dived before, Violet—from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep — instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter. Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair—t,a,c,l—she could not make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I’ve lost my next note. Got it. The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head,and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes—telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression—that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude. She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an un-analyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vairfurred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-tom wreath. A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters.
Desire | Impression | Time |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
Whoever loves much, performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
So he was deserted. The whole world was clamoring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, - by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing.