This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
Novels |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
But the root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.
Acquaintance | Defects | Experience | Genius | Good | Knowledge | Life | Life | Novels | Play | Thought | Time | Woman | Words | Thought |
Within my own life, I read all the beloved novels by lamps of vegetable oil; I saw the Standard Oil invading my own village, I saw gas lamps in the Chinese shops in Shanghai; and I saw their elimination by electric lights.
Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as by the latter.
Novels |
Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen
The straight sunny tombstones looked sociable, fresh wreaths were laid on the breasts of the graves. You could almost see the dead sitting up holding their flowers, like invalids on a visiting-day, waiting to hear the music. Only the very new dead, under raw earth with no tombstones, lay flat in despair…
Degeneracy | Novels | Reading | Sense |
He's such an old bachelor that the way he cleans out his fireplace is to carry the ashes through the house, shovel-load at a time, and dump ‘em out through the front door.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest.
Imagination | Important | Novels | Think |