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
Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence; Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part. They taught me to express my deep abhorrence if I caught anyone preferring Art To Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart. I lived with crooks but seldom was molested; The Pure-in-heart can never be arrested.
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
I had this Melanesian belle, a comely looking lass, and I was headed for the shrubbery, which grows very lush in those parts. Well, her husband was following behind holding a forefinger up in the air and crying, 'One dollah, one dollah!'
The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes each year to disguise the clanking mechanism of machine within machine within machine.
Taste |
Soldier, there is a war between the mind and sky, between thought and day and night. It is for that the poet is always in the sun, patches the moon together in his room to his virgilian cadences, up down, up down. It is a war that never ends.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's control not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the warm skin of which he felt a teleplastic mass that appeared to the touch uncommonly like cold, uncooked liver. (The Vane Sisters)
Little |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind—as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale because a branch is scraping on the pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canals black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.
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 |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
Suffer no anxiety, for he who is a sufferer of anxiety becomes regardless of enjoyment of the world and the spirit, and contraction happens to his body and soul.
Agony | Conscience | Deeds | Judgment | Soul | Truth | Deeds |
Knowledge helps dormant intelligence to awake and become conscious which automatically brings so many additional advantages.
That charm which causes the gods not to disagree, and not to hate one another, that do we prepare in your house, as a means of agreement for your folk.
I dedicate this soul; I am a sacrifice, a sacrifice to them. Bowing low, I fall at the Feet of the Lord.