This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Each time I think of the essential, I seem to glimpse it in silence or explosion, in stupor or exclamation. Never in speech.
Indifference | Regret | Universe | Will |
Two thirds of human existence are wasted in hesitation.
My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own story books, before I could read them for myself I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the head of fairy tales. In Once upon a time, an o had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers. When the day came years later for me to see the Book of Kells, all the wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept over me a thousand times, and the illumination, the gold, seemed a part of the world's beauty and holiness that had been there from the start.
Indifference | Passion |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Mardonius was more fond of me than I was of him. That always gives one an advantage.
Literature | Virtue | Virtue | World |
I fell, giving the arm at least a million stairs | and now you're not there is a vacuum at each step .
Indifference | Lord |
Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally. It's just that he isn't a real person at all; he's just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn't there.
The moral improvement of the nations and their individual components has not kept pace with the march of intellect and the advance of industry. Before the assaults of criticism many ancient strongholds of faith have given way, and doubt is fast spreading even into circles where its expression is forbidden. Morality, long accustomed to the watchful tutelage of faith, finds this connection loosened or severed, while no new protector has arisen to champion her rights, no new instruments been created to enforce her lessons among the people. As a consequence we behold a general laxness in regard to obligations the most sacred and dear. An anxious unrest, a fierce craving desire for gain has taken possession of the commercial world, and in instances no longer rare the most precious and permanent goods of human life have been madly sacrificed in the interests of momentary enrichment.
The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to.