This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
And the chandeliers are neat . . . but their mignon, marblish glare! We are cold, the parrots cried, in a place so debonair.
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend on one another, as a man depends on a woman, day on night, the imagined on the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace and forth the particulars of rapture come.
Peace |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
But then what should I have done with you, Nina, how should I have disposed of the store of sadness that had gradually accumulated as a result of our seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings?
Disguise | Dreams | Evil | Life | Life | Promise | Reality | Thought | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
He was one of those persons whom one loves not because of some lustrous streak of talent (this retired businessman possessed none), but because every moment spent with them fits exactly the gauge of one's life. There are friendships like circuses, waterfalls, libraries; there are others comparable to old dressing gowns. You found nothing especially attractive about Maximov's mind if you took it apart: his ideas were conservative, his tastes undistinguished: but somehow or other these dull components formed a wonderfully comfortable and harmonious whole.
Afraid |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
Betrayal | Consciousness | Familiarity | Force | Fraternity | Life | Life | Order | People | Torture | Parting |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
A strange thing has happened -- while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
Beginning | Example | Failure | Heart | Light | Little | Nothing | Pain | Sense | Taste | Time | Waste | Will | Wonder | Failure |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if Charlotte Brontë had possessed say three hundred a year — but the foolish woman sold the copyright of her novels outright for fifteen hundred pounds; had somehow possessed more knowledge of the busy world, and towns and regions full of life; more practical experience, and intercourse with her kind and acquaintance with a variety of character. In those words she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects as a novelist but upon those of her sex. at that time. She knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience and intercourse and travel had been granted her. But they were not granted; they were withheld; and we must accept the fact that all those good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman; written too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so poor that they could not afford to, buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which to write Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Even Morgan seems to me to be based on some hidden rock. Talking of Proust and Lawrence he said he'd prefer to be Lawrence; but much rather would be himself. He is aloof, serene, a snob, he says, reading masterpieces only.
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
In quarrels such as these not ours to intervene.
A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking.
Children | Tenderness |
All the crimes of man begin with the vagrancy of childhood.
Melancholy | Serenity |
It seems that a certain power of achievement is given to man. He appropriates creation to human needs. Such is his function. He has the audacity necessary to accomplish it; one might also say the impiety.... Man, this short-lived being, this creature always surrounded by death, undertakes the infinite.... He has his idea of fitness; the universe must accept it. Besides, has he not a universe of his own? He expects to make of it what seems to him good. A universe is raw material. The world, work of God, is man's canvas. Everything restrains man, but nothing stops him. He overcomes limits by jumping over them. The impossible is a perpetually receding frontier.... Formerly he took all this trouble for Xerxes; today, less foolish, he takes the trouble for himself. This diminution of stupidity is called progress.
Soul |
One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.