This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
And if God choose I shall but love thee better after death.
Greatness | Restlessness | Think |
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed and worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright, let temple burn, or flax; an equal light leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed: and love is fire. And when I say at need I love thee ... mark! ... I love thee -- in thy sight I stand transfigured, glorified aright, with conscience of the new rays that proceed out of my face toward thine. There's nothing low in love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures who love God, God accepts while loving so. And what I feel, across the inferior features of what I am, doth flash itself, and show how that great work of Love enhances Nature's.
Daring |
There is a haunting phantom called Regret, a shadowy creature robed somewhat like woe, but fairer in the face, whom all men know by her said mien, and eyes forever wet. No heart would seek her; but once having met all take her by the hand, and to and fro they wander through those paths of long ago-- those hallowed ways 'twere wiser to forget.
Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! What a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life - to have screwed oneself down to one's work - all for a mere delusion! Bah! What does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust.
Eugene Ware, aka "Ironquill", fully Captain Eugene Fitch Ware
The lightning-bug is brilliant, but he hasn't any mind He stumbles through existence with his head-light on behind.
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.
I believe so. In its beginning, dialogue’s the easiest thing in the world to write when you have a good ear, which I think I have. But as it goes on, it’s the most difficult, because it has so many ways to function. Sometimes I needed to make a speech do three or four or five things at once—reveal what the character said but also what he thought he said, what he hid, what others were going to think he meant, and what they misunderstood, and so forth—all in his single speech. And the speech would have to keep the essence of this one character, his whole particular outlook in concentrated form. This isn’t to say I succeeded. But I guess it explains why dialogue gives me my greatest pleasure in writing.
A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmth from the fire and with the pity and beauty and power of her death. The thunder rolled.
There is a city to be built, the plan of which we carry in our heads, in our hearts. Countless generations have already toiled at the building of it. The effort to aid in completing it, with us, takes the place of prayer. In this sense we say, "Laborare est orare."
Daring | Life | Life | Man | Men | Present | Righteousness | Search | Theories | Thinkers | Thought | Time | Truth | Unity | Will | Woman | World | Youth | Youth | Learn | Thought |
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 |