This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Rearing a family is probably the most difficult job in the world. It resembles two business firms merging their respective resources to make a single product. All the potential headaches of that operation are present when an adult male and an adult female join to steer a child from infancy to adulthood.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system, so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past.
Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves.
Body | Family | Observation |
It's sad that children cannot know their parents when they were younger; when they were loving, courting, and being nice to one another. By the time children are old enough to observe, the romance has all too often faded or gone underground.
Change | Family | Study | World | Understand |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Men felt a chill in their hearts; a damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth, one subterfuge was tried after another … sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable.
Better |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.
Deeds | Ends | Family | Land | Lying | Man | Memory | Need | Work | Deeds |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Women are so suspicious of any interest that has not some obvious motive behind it, so terribly accustomed to concealment and suppression, that they are off at the flicker of an eye turned observingly in their direction.
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 |
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes. - The flowers fading like our hopes, the leaves falling like our years, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives - all bear secret relations to our destinies.
Abuse | Destiny | Ends | Example | Family | Future | Glory | Humility | Nothing | Search | Silence | Thought | Following | Old | Thought |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
We learn to escape from self-defeating behavior in small ways at first. You can do this by thinking of present situations where you now say YES but wish you could stop. Recall several small situations. Perhaps you have agreed to meet regularly with a friend or relative but realize that it is really a burden. Maybe you agreed to take the leadership in a certain project but now you wish you had declined. You now know WHERE you must say NO. The next step is also clear. SAY NO. Make the necessary contact and resign. Just like that. Do it even if you feel nervous about it. Don’t listen to your timidity. Do what is right. Do you know what you are doing! You are getting your life back!