This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It was always the same; other people gave up loving before she did. They got spoilt, or else they went away; in any case, they were partly to blame. Why did it happen so? She herself never changed; when she loved anyone, it was for life. She could not understand desertion; it was something so huge, so monstrous that the notion of it made her little heart break.
Crime | Defense | Existence | Important | Justification | War |
Nothing is more irritating than to hear honest writers protest about depravity when one is quite certain that they make these noises without knowing what they are protesting about.
But we can also see at once that there is no line between normal and neurotic, as we all lie and are all bound in some ways by the lies. Neurosis is, then, something we all share; it is universal.4 Or, putting it another way, normality is neurosis, and vice versa. We call a man "neurotic" when his lie begins to show damaging effects on him or on people around him and he seeks clinical help for it—or others seek it for him. Otherwise, we call the refusal of reality “normal" because it doesn't occasion any visible problems. It is really as simple as that. After all, if someone who lives alone wants to get out of bed a half-dozen times to see if the door is really locked, or another washes and dries his hands exactly three times every time or uses a half-roll of toilet tissue each time he relieves himself—there is really no human problem involved. These people are earning their safety in the face of the reality of creatureliness in relatively innocuous and untroublesome ways.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition. Even the great Victorian artists were all anti-Victorian, despite the pressures to conform.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
I can never understand how two men can write a book together; to me, that's like three people getting together to have a baby.
Everett Dirksen, fully Everett McKinley Dirksen
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money. [Attributed but disavowed by Dirksen]
Crime | Evidence | Innocence | Need | Understand |
Through being too knowing the fox lost his tail.
Government | Guilt | People | Public | Truth | Warning | Government |
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
And what do you fear lady? he asked. ?A cage ? she said. ?To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.
Conspiracy | Guilt | Murder | Murder |
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that came down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures. And of these histories most fair still in the ears of the Elves is the tale of Beren and L£thien
Crime | Individual | Power | World |