This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If you do not know where you are or what clan you are, how will you find the balance?
Experience | Truth |
I want to have a lasting experience of God', I told him. 'Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.
Divinity | Experience | Understand |
I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.
Accomplishment | Beauty | Experience | Means | Need | Nothing | Order | Beauty |
My love affair with (him) had a wonderful element of romance to it, which I will always cherish. But it was not an infatuation, and here’s how I can tell: because I did not demand that he become my Great Emancipator or my Source of All Life, nor did I immediately vanish into that man’s chest cavity like a twisted, unrecognizable, parasitical homonculus. During our long period of courtship, I remained intact within my own personality, and I allowed myself to meet (him) for who he was.
Awareness | Experience | Life | Life | Awareness |
Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: 'You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.
Beauty | Excellence | Experience | Pleasure | Trust | Will | World | Excellence | Beauty |
Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one's own senses, and THIS makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. This is why, Barzini says, Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captain of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors... In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.
Experience | Life | Life | Past |
I want to learn how to speak Italian. For years, I'd wished I could speak Italian--a language I find more beautiful than roses.
Divinity | Experience | God | World | God | Learn | Understand |
Italian men are like show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud.
Opinion |
I know this simple fact to be true, for I myself have abandoned people who did not want me to go, and I myself have been abandoned by those whom I begged to stay.
Absolute | Acceptance | Eternal | Experience | Forgiveness | God | Universe | Forgiveness | God | Forgive |
A few weeks ago he said to me, completely ou of nowhere, 'You good friend to me, Liss. Loyal friend.' Then he sighed, stared off into space and added mournfully, ' Not like Sharon.' Who the hell is Sharon? What did she do to him? When I tried asking him about it, he would give me no answer. Acted suddenly like he didn't know who I was even referring to. As if I were the one who'd brought up that thieving hussy Sharon in the first place.)
Why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love goes away. You are born with nothing, you work hard, then you die with nothing. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old.
You are not only what you think about it. The feelings are a slave to your thoughts, and you're a slave to your emotions.
Divinity | Effort | Experience |
I have a card stuck on my refrigerator that shows a woman standing in reverence before an open freezer door, saying, 'Amazing! Perfect ice cubes again.' That's the kind of simple rapture I am talking about. I realize we are not put on this earth to stand around open freezers ranting like idiots about ice cubes. But a good quesiton to ask yourself is this: If perfect ice cubes or an evening sky or an old song on the radio has not made your heart flip-flop lately, why not? What is keeping you from feeling the rapture?
Change | Experience | Failure | Order | People | Safe | Failure |
Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.
Better | Depression | Dreams | Important | Integrity | Marriage | Men | Mother | Relationship | Sense | Ugly | Talent |
The four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry.
Then, I will be a real Italian girl, instead of a total American who still can't hear someone across the street to his friend Marco without wanting instinctively to yell back Polo!
Little | Mother | Order | Time | Understand |
It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.
Men | Nations | Opinion | Philosophy | Wise |