This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American—on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.
Change | Contentment | Death | Dreams | Fulfillment | Mother | Need |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Although the Russian bourgeois revolution of 1905-07 displayed no such “brilliant” successes as at time fell to the Portuguese and Turkish revolutions, it was undoubtedly a “real people’s” revolution, since the mass of the people, their majority, the very lowest social groups, crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and stamped on the entire course of the revolution the imprint of their own demands, their attempt to build in their own way a new society in place of the old society that was being destroyed.
Culture | Genius | Oppression | Science | Will |
Vivienne Westwood, born Vivienne Isabel Swire
I think dress, hairstyle and make-up are the crucial factors in projecting an attractive persona and give one the chance to enhance one's best physical features.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
For the first time the peasant has seen real freedom — freedom to eat his bread, freedom from starvation.
Culture | Labor | Technology | Time | Work |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
If democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class domination, then why should not a socialist minister charm the whole bourgeois world by orations on class collaboration?
Aid | Culture | Government | Government |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's control not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the warm skin of which he felt a teleplastic mass that appeared to the touch uncommonly like cold, uncooked liver. (The Vane Sisters)
Little |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind—as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale because a branch is scraping on the pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten, often several times, every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
Accident | Day | Infancy | Mother | Nothing | Style | Writing |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canals black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Beauty | Good | Heart | Literature | Mind | Unity | Will | Worth | Beauty |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part jewel, part mud. In the midst of my usual afternoon stroll through the small hilly town attached to the girls' college where I taught French literature, I had stopped to watch a family of brilliant icicles drip-dripping from the eaves of a frame house. So clear-cut were their pointed shadows on the white boards behind them that I was sure the shadows of the falling drops should be visible too. But they were not. (The Vane Sisters)
Common Sense | Existence | Light | Mother | Panic | People | Sense | Time | World |
We have accepted the watertight compartments of society, the fragmentation of living as factual and necessary. We live in relationship to these fragments and accept the internalized divisions—the various roles we play, the contradictory value systems, the opposing motives and priorities—as reality. We are at odds with ourselves internally; we believe that the inner is fundamentally different from the outer, that what is me is quite separate from the not-me, that divisions among people and nations are necessary, and yet we wonder why there are tensions, conflicts, wars in the world. The conflicts begin with minds that believe in fragmentation and are ignorant of wholeness.
Acceptance | Action | Awareness | Culture | Desire | Meaning | Passion | Peace | Problems | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Service | Society | Will | Society | Awareness |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Kay Arr, said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say Kay Arr close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvelous discovery indeed - that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life!
Contemplation | Control | Decision | Father | Inclination | Light | Mother | Position | Qualities | Quiet | Sadness | Spirit | Parting | Contemplation | Old |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story.