This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley
It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishment the scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.
Chance |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
Chance | Civilization | Culture | Devotion | Humanity | Ignorance | Men | Will | World |
Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. It is that one finding oneself in one of life's critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways. No. One may simply default. Pass. Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one's heel and leave. Exit. Why after all need one act humanly?
It may be that the ignorant man, alone, has any chance to mate his life with life
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
For we must not build temples according to the same rules to all gods alike, since the performance of the sacred rites varies with the various gods.
Vivienne Westwood, born Vivienne Isabel Swire
I think feminists are unaware of the tremendous extent of the role of women in history.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolutionary defensism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest.
Chance | Conversation |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue afternoon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out I rested a while on a boulder and then thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors - for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company - both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic - one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
Chance | Individual | Intelligence |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent, all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell againand oh, no, Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azureall would be shattered.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
There's this place in me where your fingerprints still rest, your kisses still linger, and your whispers softly echo. It's the place where a part of you will forever be a part of me.