This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?
Death |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
Church | Desire | Knowledge | Love | Man | Nothing | Passion | Truth | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
No, never say now, no one in this world, that they were this or that. She felt very young, and at the same time unspeakably old. As a razor passed through all; while kept out looking. He had a perpetual sense, as she watched the cars, being outside, alone and far out at sea; always felt it was very, very dangerous to live, for one day it was. Do not judge that smart, or too out of the ordinary. Nor could learn how life had gone through with the few fingers that had given him knowledge Fräulein Daniels. I knew nothing, nor language, nor history; rarely read a book now, except memoirs in bed, but as the absorbed everything, cars passing, and would not say to Peter, would not say of herself: I am this, I am what .
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I have lost friends, some by death ... others by sheer inability to cross the street.
Children |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I will achieve in my life - Heaven grant that it be not long - some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.
Beauty | Enough | Life | Life | Nature | People | Sorrow | Beauty |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work, - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
Desire | Man | Nothing | Passion | Rage | Sense | Happiness |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She was beautifully adapted for life in another planet. But the natural genius she had for conducting affairs there was of no real use to her here. Her watch, for example, was a constant source of surprise to her, and at the age of sixty-five she was still amazed at the ascendancy which rules and reasons exerted over the lives of other people. She had never learnt her lesson, and had constantly to be punished for her ignorance.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Think of me, the uneducated child reading books in my room at 22 Hyde Park Gate -- now advanced to this glory... Yes; all that reading, I say, has borne this odd fruit. And I am pleased.
Death |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and the novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage. To make our meaning plain — Orlando could come home from one of these routs at three or four in the morning with cheeks like a Christmas tree and eyes like stars. She would untie a lace, pace the room a score of times, untie another lace, stop, and pace the room again. Often the sun would be blazing over Southwark chimneys before she could persuade herself to get into bed, and there she would lie, pitching and tossing, laughing and sighing for an hour or longer before she slept at last. And what was all this stir about? Society. And what had society said or done to throw a reasonable lady into such an excitement? In plain language, nothing. Rack her memory as she would, next day Orlando could never remember a single word to magnify into the name something. Lord O. had been gallant. Lord A. polite. The Marquis of C. charming. Mr. M. amusing. But when she tried to recollect in what their gallantry, politeness, charm, or wit had consisted, she was bound to suppose her memory at fault, for she could not name a thing. It was the same always. Nothing remained over the next day, yet the excitement of the moment was intense. Thus we are forced to conclude that society is one of those brews such as skilled housekeepers serve hot about Christmas time, whose flavour depends upon the proper mixing and stirring of a dozen different ingredients. Take one out, and it is in itself insipid. Take away Lord O., Lord A., Lord C., or Mr. M. and separately each is nothing. Stir them all together and they combine to give off the most intoxicating of flavours, the most seductive of scents. Yet this intoxication, this seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis. At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever. Such monsters the poets and the novelists alone can deal with; with such something-nothings their works are stuffed out to prodigious size; and to them with the best will in the world we are content to leave it.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
We have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal in the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The first duty of a lecturer — to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.
Beauty | Better | Books | Children | Enough | Hate | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Nothing | Past | People | Sorrow | Beauty | Friends |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Some people make bad bed. They just have to lie in it.
People |
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
Since, O Mazda, from the beginning, Thou didst create soul and body; mental power and knowledge and since Thou didst place life within the corporeal body and didst bestow to mankind the power to act, speak and guide, you wished that everyone should choose his or her own faith and path freely .
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Admiration is a terrible thing. It is division. The idea stands between you and the good life.