This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.
Beauty | Day | Ends | Husband | Mind | Praise | Reading | Time | Beauty | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
In this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow. (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house and grounds)
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 |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.
Absolute | Cleanliness | Contemplation | Love | Means | Men | Reading | System | Woman | Words | World | Contemplation |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.
Ends | Enough | Light | Play | Reading | Will | Work | Old |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
You have neither wife nor child (without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness).
Books | Impetuosity | Reading | Will | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
Little | Reading | Technology | Will | Understand |
Science can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.
Modern anthropocentrism inevitably meant that He who allegedly endowed man with his inalienable rights began to disappear from the world: He was so far beyond the grasp of modern science that he was gradually pushed into a sphere of privacy of sorts, if not directly into a sphere of private fancy — that is, to a place where public obligations no longer apply. The existence of a higher authority than man himself simply began to get in the way of human aspirations.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for ages past. Advances in science will also bring higher standards of living, will lead to the prevention or cure of diseases, will promote conservation of our limited national resources, and will assure means of defense against aggression. But to achieve these objectives — to secure a high level of employment, to maintain a position of world leadership — the flow of new scientific knowledge must be both continuous and substantial.