This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
Thus by such victory, not by machines but in oppositions to the principle to the principles of machines, has the freedom of states been preserved by the cunning of architects.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction. The purpose of this foreword is not to show that Bend Sinister belongs or does not belong to serious literature (which is a euphemism for the hollow profundity and the ever-welcome commonplace). I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: great books). I am not sincere, I am not provocative, I am not satirical. I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of thaw in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent. As in the case of my Invitation to a Beheading - with which this book has obvious affinities - automatic comparisons between Bend Sinister and Kafka's creations or Orwell's cliches would go merely to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.
Sound | Tenderness |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
Sound | Tenderness | World |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
All of the other people have committed crimes, the Jews are the only ones who have boasted about committing them. They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not someday become deadly to the human race.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
This whole psychiatry is nothing else but a kind of microcosm of communism [...]. It would be better left to people their personal problems. For the question arises whether the problems are not the only thing in the world that people may have on the property?
Appetite | Awareness | Ceremony | Light | Reflection | Sense | Sound | Time | Awareness |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life.
Nothing |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
And that's the last oath I shall ever be able to swear, she thought; once I set foot on English soil. And I shall never be able to crack a man over the head, or tell him he lies in his teeth, or draw my sword and run him through the body, or sit among my peers, or wear a coronet, or walk in procession, or sentence a man to death, or lead an army, or prance down Whitehall on a charger, or wear seventy-two different medals on my breast. All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea and ask my lords how they like it. D'you take sugar? D'you take cream? And mincing out the words, she was horrified to perceive how low an opinion she was forming of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong.
Beauty | Conversation | Little | Space | Spirit | Wise | Beauty |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?
Sound |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.
Conversation | Spirit | Wise |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man, they say.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.