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
The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Death | Eternal | Fame | Growth | Hell | Nothing | Power | Public | Punishment |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an American businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.
Day | Gold | Luxury | Memory | Necessity | Pity | Public | Reason | Will | Child | Old |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
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Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The great consolation in life is to say what one thinks.
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
I come back dissatisfied - I put it away, and when I have rested a little, I go and look at it with a kind of fear. Then I am still dissatisfied, because I still have that splendid scene too clearly in my mind to be satisfied with what I have made of it. But I find in my work an echo of what struck me...
Force | Hope | Influence | Present | Public | Work | Think |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The punishment of criminals should be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing and a man condemned to public labor still serves the fatherland and is a living lesson.
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Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The punishment of criminals should serve a purpose. When a man is hanged he is useless.
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.
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Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Well, I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married.
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
The only safety for the conquered is to expect no safety.
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Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.
Self-confidence is not pride. Just the contrary: only a person or a nation that is self-confident, in the best sense of the word, is capable of listening to others, accepting them as equals, forgiving its enemies and regretting its own guilt.
Global | Good | History | Influence | Integration | Life | Life | Nothing | Order | Public | Taste | Learn |
V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.