This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The poem refreshes life so that we share, for a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies belief in an immaculate beginning and sends us, winged by an unconscious will, to an immaculate end. We move between these points: from that ever-early candor to its late plural.
When I think of our lands I think of the house and the table that holds a platter of pears, vermilion smeared over green, arranged for show.
Past |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Now I remember, when she was a child, were in fashion - oh, not only children, but also adults, such things were called Netcom - and they were supposed to, then a special mirror, little Curves - is distorted, nothing can be understood, failure, confusion, all the slides in the eyes, but its curvature was a reason, but just because I have brought ... Or, rather, to its curvature were chosen so ... No, wait, I did not explain. In short, you had such a wild here mirror and a collection of different netok, that is absolutely ridiculous things: any such shapeless, mottled, in holes, in spots, ryabye, knobby things, like some resources, but a mirror that ordinary objects is distorted now, so get real food, that is, when you're so weird and ugly object placed so that it is reflected in a strange and ugly mirror turned out great, not on there made ??it so, all restored, all was well, - and that of formless pestryad was obtained in a mirror image of the lovely slender flowers, craft, figure, some landscape. Could - in order - even your own portrait, that is, you were given some hideous mess, and it was you, but you had the key to the mirror. Ah, I remember when it was fun and a little scary - what if it will not work! - To take the hand that's such a new obscure Netcom and zoom to the mirror, and see in it, as your hand is completely decomposed, but how pointless Netcom develops into a beautiful picture, clear, clear.
Past |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Perhaps if the year was 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middleclass nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged -- the same house, the same people -- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.
Beauty | Contemplation | Past | Work | Beauty | Contemplation |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
We shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden.
Past |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point in space, the poet sees everything that happens in one point in time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighbouring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-grey sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur - all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair in Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.
Traditionally, there have been two separate approaches. One approach takes us toward the social, the economic, the political problems, and says, “Look here, unless the economic and political problems are solved, there will be no happiness and no peace, there will be no end to suffering. It is the responsibility of every individual to engage in solving these problems according to some ideology. Turning toward the inner life, the imbalances and impurities of the inner life, that is not so important, that can be taken care of later on, for it is a self-centered, egoistic activity. But the responsibility is toward the society, toward the human race, so keep aside all those problems of meditation and silence, inner sophistication, transformation for inner revolution—keep all that aside. First turn toward this.” And the other approach says, “The political and economic problems cannot be solved unless the individual is transformed totally. Be concerned with your psychological mutation, the inner, radical revolution. The political, the economic, the social problems can wait.”
Beginning | Existence | Future | Global | Past | Relationship | Science | Technology |
Silence in Action - Sensitivity and Pain - To live requires energy and fearlessness, but we are brought up in a pleasure-hunting human race, and pain is something to be afraid of, to be driven away completely, to protect oneself from. But it is the pain and pleasure - the duality - together that make the whole, the wholeness of life. The more sensitive you are and the more you live from the depth of your being, the more vulnerable you are to life. The more sensitive you are and the more capable of loving human beings, the more you will be hurt; there is more sorrow, there is more pain. Psychological hurts, pain and sorrow accompany the sensitivity, intelligence and love. Love and sorrow go together. So, if there is physical or psychological pain, you live with it - not out of despair, not out of self-pity, not out of any weakness. You live with it because it is part of life, it is an expression of life.
Absence | Body | Existence | Illusion | Knowledge | Past | Silence | Thought | Thought |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
Now it so happens in the world that opposed to characters of such persons as he there are characters like mine, for instance. I care as little for the world's opinion as that man cared for what was right. To appear right was enough for him; what I th
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the color of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.
Belief | Body | Courage | Freedom | Habit | Life | Life | Little | Men | Opportunity | Past | Reality | Talking | Will | World |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings.
Experience | Past | Will | Wonder |