This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
In two decades I've lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.
Estelle R. Ramey, born Stella Rosemary Rubin
In man, the shedding of blood is always associated with injury, disease, or death. Only the female half of humanity was seen to have the magical ability to bleed profusely and still rise phoenix-like each month from the gore.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
A child develops individuality long before he develops taste. I have seen my kid straggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory -- an empty bottle of gin.
Depression | Desire | Giving | Little | Men | Money | Troubles | Work | Think |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn't danced in television.
Estelle R. Ramey, born Stella Rosemary Rubin
As an endocrinologist in good standing, I was startled to learn that ovarian hormones are toxic to brain cells.
Hospitality | Listening | Men | Thinking | Tradition | Old |
The beef is strong and powerful, he does not even know. It absorbs a multitude of plants, devouring pre, what a great advantage in going to remove it? He ruminates, it heavily floundering in the barn where encloses a sad man, heavy, useless as him. The man kills him, he eats, he will not be better, and after that beef is dead, the man dies. What will remain of both? some fertilizer that will produce new grass, and some grass feed of new flesh. How vain and dumb vicissitude of life and death! how cold world! And how is it that it is good instead of not?
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery.
Men |
I cannot believe that God would make to a sinner in his wants and his woes the tender of a relief which did not exist, or which he did not wish him to embrace; I cannot believe that God would command his creatures to embrace a provision which had never been made for them, or sanction by the peril of one’s everlasting interests a commandment which he never meant should be obeyed, and which itself precluded the possibility of obedience.
Eternal | Force | God | Inconsistency | Judgment | Life | Life | Lord | Men | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Will | God | Understand |
Since technology, like gas, will fill any conceptual space provided, Leo Marx, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes it as a “hazardous concept” that may “stifle and obfuscate analytic thinking”. He notes, “Because of its peculiar susceptibility to reification, to being endowed with the magical power of an autonomous entity, technology is a major contributant to that gathering sense… of political impotence. The popularity of the belief that technology is the primary force shaping the postmodern world is a measure of our.. neglect of moral and political standards, in making decisive choices about the direction of society.”
Cost | Day | Knowledge | Men | Opposition | Organization | Public | Will |
The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive
Capacity | Eternal | Individual | Lesson | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Men | Problems | Rank | Sense | Society | World | Society | Trouble |
There is the type of man who has great contempt for "imÂmediacy," who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the "introvert." He is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person, with individuality and uniqueness. He enjoys solitude and withÂdraws periodically to reflect, perhaps to nurse ideas about his secret self, what it might be. This, after all is said and done, is the only real problem of life, the only worthwhile preoccupation of man: What is one's true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this uniqueÂness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself? How can the person take his private inner being, the great mystery that he feels at the heart of himself, his emotions, his yearnings and use them to live more distinctively, to enrich both himself and manÂkind with the peculiar quality of his talent? In adolescence, most of us throb with this dilemma, expressing it either with words and thoughts or with simple numb pain and longing. But usually life suck us up into standardized activities. The social hero-system into which we are born marks out paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate.
Character | Creativity | Death | Defense | Defiance | Dread | Failure | Insanity | Life | Life | Looks | Means | Men | Misfortune | Nature | Parents | People | Price | Reality | Sense | Style | Tragedy | Will | Wonder | World | Misfortune | Failure |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.
Men |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.