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
Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day which I first knew with certainty that the red convertible was following us.
Art | Beauty | Dawn | Doubt | Light | Literature | Nonsense | Sense | Yielding | Art | Beauty |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
There was a time in my demented youth when somehow I suspected that the truth about survival after death was known to every human being: I alone knew nothing, and a great conspiracy of books and people hid the truth from me.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Beauty | Good | Heart | Literature | Mind | Unity | Will | Worth | Beauty |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms -- some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh.
Literature | Following |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.
Books | Literature |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.
Contempt | Cultivation | Literature | Reward |
Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
The quality of each man's life is the full measure of that man's personal commitment to excellence and to victory.
Family | Life | Life | Philosophy |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady's-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.
Literature | Posterity |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
Literature | Nature |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say ‘Yes’, they say ‘No’; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.
Literature | Talking | Thought | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave, the clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. We shall not always give out a sound like a beaten gong as one sensation strikes and then another. Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.
Comfort | Lord | Nature | Philosophy | Waste | Will | Old | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
In the Queen's prayerbook, along with the blood-stain, was also a lock of hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now added to these keepsakes a flake of tobacco, and so, reading and smoking, was moved by the humane jumble of them all--the hair, the pastry, the blood-stain, the tobacco--to such a mood of contemplation as gave her a reverent air suitable in the circumstances, though she had, it is said, no traffic with the usual God.
Art | Books | Literature | Little | Space | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Work | Writing | Art |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
This is one of the tortures and miseries of life: our friends when they are unable to finish their stories.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
There's just this… an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined.
Art | Better | Books | Criticism | Enough | Future | History | Hope | Means | Money | Past | Philosophy | Poetry | Research | Thought | Will | Art | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not. But, as I put down my glass I remember; I am engaged to be married. I am to dine with my friends tonight. I am Bernard.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
What did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer.
All that was neither a city, nor a church, nor a river, nor color, nor light, nor shadow: it was reverie. For a long time, I remained motionless, letting myself be penetrated gently by this unspeakable ensemble, by the serenity of the sky and the melancholy of the moment. I do not know what was going on in my mind, and I could not express it; it was one of those ineffable moments when one feels something in himself which is going to sleep and something which is awakening.
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
It is genius that brings into being, and it is taste that preserves. Without taste genius is nought but sublime folly.
Admiration | Censure | Literature | Opinion |