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
She lived, we'll say, a harmless life, she called a virtuous life, a quiet life, which was not life at all (But that she had not lived enough to know)
Mystery |
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Lest Love should value less what loss would value more, had it the stricken privilege --- it cherishes before.
If you get rid of the four-layered neurotic shield, the armor that covers the characterological lie about life, how can you talk about “enjoying” this Pyrrhic victory? The person gives up something restricting and illusory, it is true, but only to come face to face with something even more awful: genuine despair. Full humanness means full fear and trembling, at least some of the waking day. When you get a person to emerge into life, away from his dependencies, his automatic safety in the cloak of someone else's power, what joy can you promise him with the burden of his aloneness? When you get a person to look at the sun as it bakes down on the daily carnage taking place on earth, the ridiculous accidents, the utter fragility of life, the powerÂlessness of those he thought most powerful—what comfort can you give him from a psychotherapeutic point of view? Luis Buimel likes to introduce a mad dog into his films as counterpoint to the secure daily routine of repressed living. The meaning of his symÂbolism is that no matter what men pretend, they are only one acÂcidental bite away from utter fallibility. The artist disguises the incongruity that is the pulse-beat of madness but he is aware of it. What would the average man do with a full consciousness of abÂsurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror. Sartre has called man a "useless passion" because he is so hopelessly bungled, so deluded about his true condition. He wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal, and so he thrives on fantasies. As Ortega so well put it in the epigraph we have used for this chapter, man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality. This is a serious game, the defense of one's existence—how take it away from people and leave them joyous?
Absolute | Character | Discussion | Dread | Faith | Feelings | Heart | Hero | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Mystery | Psychology | Religion | Self | Service | Time | Value |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
We think. We are not peasants. We are mechanics. But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war. Everybody hates war. There is a class that control a country that is stupid and down not realize anything and never can. That is why we have this war. Also they make money out of it.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Nature, it has been said, abhors a vacuum, and when the available "spiritual space" is not filled by some higher motivation, then it will necessarily be filled by something lower – by the small, mean, calculating attitude to life which is rationalized in the economic calculus.
The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it, and offer it to the reader.
That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.
Bible | Control | Enough | God | Mystery | Parents | Present | Reading | Receive | Relationship | Trust | God | Bible | Learn | Think | Understand |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).
Darkness | Death | Defeat | Earth | Failure | Hope | Life | Life | Light | Love | Mystery | Nothing | Power | Reading | Sadness | Will | Failure |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Asked who was the worst president, he responded, Oh, there were so many of them. Certainly the silliest was Reagan. The most empty. [George H.W.] Bush is in the running for the worst.
One enemy is too many, and a hundred friends are too few.
Who by himself can do anything, do not wait for others to do.