This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
This is the perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing.
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens, when I have no engagements written on my block, when no one comes to disturb my inward peace, when no one comes to take me away from myself and turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle, a broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection, being so contrived that it takes too long a time to get myself back to myself when they have gone.
Body | Church | Destroy | Esteem | Kill | Nothing | Thought | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
A little downy girl still wearing poppies still eating popcorn in the colored gloam where tawny Indians took paid croppers because you stole her from her wax-browed and dignified protector spitting into his heavy-lidded eye ripping his flavid toga and at dawn leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort the awfulness of love and violets remorse despair while you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away because of all you did because of all I did not you have to die
Art | Capacity | Good | Guests | Husband | Impression | Men | People | Quiet | Smile | Space | Woman | Art |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds.
Kill |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
Bitterness | Experience | Quiet |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.
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.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Complacency is a coin by the aid of which all the world can, for want of essential means, pay its club bill in society. - It is necessary, however, that it may lose nothing of its merits, to associate judgment and prudence with it.
Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
All right Mister, let me tell you what winning means... you're willing to go longer, work harder, give more than anyone else.
Better | Dedication | Quiet | World |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
That sovereign is a tyrant who knows no law but his own caprice.