This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.
I don’t think we often see life resolving itself, not in any sort of perfect way, but I like the fiction writer’s feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art, however imperfectly and briefly—to give it a form and try to embody it—to hold it and express it in a story’s terms.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
The only way I can describe the extent of my anxiety is to say that I felt as if I we're pregnant with a rock.
Genius |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
Ælian, in his account of Zoilus, the pretended critic, who wrote against Homer and Plato, and thought himself wiser than all who had gone before him, tells us that this Zoilus had a very long beard that hung down upon his breast, but no hair upon his head, which he always kept close shaved, regarding, it seems, the hairs of his head as so many suckers, which, if they had been suffered to grow, might have drawn away the nourishment from his chin, and by that means have starved his beard.
The idea of a poem European music and colorful had been in Bell , as well as instinct, a matter of culture, but some had been accompanied or preceded, in him, a practice some more 'inert and passive of the new isms found in air. Even futurism official had demanded, as the innovators of the century, to break the windows, to renew the air. Bell, however, had chosen the finest masters of those followed by his provisional initiators. Repudiated by instinct the more mechanical, more elencativa of liberalism fashion, and went, one can safely say this also in fact, to the most reliable sources of that movement, from Whitman toRimbaud . He reported on his own, in art and life, a matter of style in a matter of consciousness and was aware of representing, in his time and in its environment, a new voice, different.
Genius |
Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
A nation which neglects the perceptions of its artists declines. After a while it ceases to act, and merely survives. There is probably no use in telling this to people who can't see it without being told.
J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.