Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Florida Scott-Maxwell

Playwright, Author and Psychologist

"I wonder why love is so often equated with joy when it is everything else as well. Devastation, balm, obsession, granting and receiving excessive value, and losing it again. It is recognition, often of what you are not but might be. It sears and it heals. It is beyond pity and above law. It can seem like truth."

"You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality."

"When you truly possess all that you have been and doneā€¦ you are fierce with reality."

"Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition. "

"It is not easy to be sure that being yourself is worth the trouble, but we do know it is our sacred duty."

"Difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive"

"Lack of will power has caused more failure than lack of intelligence or ability."

"The crucial task of old age is balance: keeping just well enough, just brave enough, just gay and interested and starkly honest enough to remain a sentient human being. "

"Anger must be the energy that has not yet found its right channel."

"Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting, and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age. To my own surprise I burst out with hot conviction. Only a few years ago I enjoyed my tranquility; now I am so disturbed by the outer world and by human quality in general that I want to put things right, as though I still owed a debt to life. I must calm down. I am far too frail to indulge in moral fervor."

"In very truth the days are almost free, and if it is another way of saying that our lives are empty, well -- there are days when emptiness is spacious, and non-existence elevating."

"I grow more intense as I age"

"Is life a pregnancy? That would make death a birth."

"My kitchen linoleum is so black and shiny that I waltz while I wait for the kettle to boil. This pleasure is for the old who live alone."

"No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement."

"You have neat, tight expectation of what life out to give you, but you won't get it. That isn't what life does. Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition."

"Is there any stab as deep as wondering where and how much you failed those you loved?"