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
What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
Death | Detachment | Heart | Love | Order | Peace | Sanity | Thought | Woman | World | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Darkness | Day | Death | Ends | Life | Life | Panic | Progress | Suicide | Thought | Time | Afraid | Old | Thought |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
But nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
I do, it is true, expect more justice from one who believes in a God than from one who has no such belief.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
If God created us in His image we have certainly returned the compliment.
Death |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
When we hear news we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
For my part I know nothing with any certainty but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave.
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
Sometimes, dear brother, I know so well what I want. I am quite able to do without God, both in my life and in my painting, but what I cannot do without, unwell as I am, is something greater than myself, which is my life, the power to create.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom--all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had.
Day | Death | Impossibility | People |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Arnold Bennett says that the horror of marriage lies in its “dailiness.” All acuteness of relationship is rubbed away by this. The truth is more like this: life — say 4 days out of 7 — becomes automatic; but on the 5th day a bead of sensation (between husband and wife) forms which is all the fuller and more sensitive because of the automatic customary unconscious days on either side. That is to say the year is marked by moments of great intensity. Hardy’s “moments of vision.” How can a relationship endure for any length of time except under these conditions?
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee.
Angels | Battle | Change | Death | Health | Heaven | Jealousy | Little | Love | Soul | Thinking | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Deeply sighed and fell - there was a passion in his gestures that deserves the word - on the bare ground at the foot of the oak. Enjoyed in feeling, in the ephemeral appearance of the summer, the backbone of the earth, saying that this was for him the hard root of the oak, or - the image using the image - it was the back of a great horse he rode , or the deck of a ship in the grip of the waves, everything, in short, as long as solid, as he longed for something which moor his floating heart, the heart that every night in the season, when wandering through the countryside, seemed filled with aromatic and languid feelings of love. The oak tree he tied it.
Death | Impossibility | People |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
If you don’t have a dog--at least one--there is not necessarily anything wrong with you, but there may be something wrong with your life.
Death |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumns trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labor, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.
Day | Death | Existence | Mind | Nothing | People | Play | Quiet | Sense | World |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
Death |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves. Some will founder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chairs. The waves rise, their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter and then the creepers.