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
Women know the way to rear up children (to be just); they know a simple, merry, tender knack of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes, and stringing pretty words that make no sense, and kissing full sense into empty words; which things are corals to cut life upon, although such trifles.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Holy Night We sate among the stalls at Bethlehem; The dumb kine from their fodder turning them, Softened their horned faces To almost human gazes Toward the newly Born: The simple shepherds from the star-lit brooks Brought visionary looks, As yet in their astonied hearing rung The strange sweet angel-tongue: The magi of the East, in sandals worn, Knelt reverent, sweeping round, With long pale beards, their gifts upon the ground, The incense, myrrh, and gold These baby hands were impotent to hold: So let all earthlies and celestials wait Upon thy royal state. Sleep, sleep, my kingly One!
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Until they are of the age to use the brain.
You will be surprised to find how much that has seemed hopelessly disagreeable possesses either an instructive or an amusing side.
Words |
Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
But nothing that can be said can begin to take away the anguish and the pain of these moments. Grief is the price we pay for love.
Words |
I cannot be just for books that deal with the woman as woman ... My idea is that everyone, both men and women, we sayons, we must be regarded as human beings.
Then she told herself to stop her nonsense. If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them, more easily each time, so easily, soon, that you did not even realize you had gone out searching. Women alone often developed into experts at the practice. She must never join their dismal league.
Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.
Conversation | Tears | Will | Wise | Words |
Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch
Sin is not offense against God, but against our humanity. It is not a state which came to us and which we cannot throw off; it is an act of our own. Sin is anti-social conduct, due to the want of resistance on our part to the influences of the animal world behind us, selfishness, or to the legacy of a phase of civilization over which and beyond which we should have passed on.
Life | Life | Love | Tears | Understanding |
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
She died--this was the way she died; and when her breath was done, took up her simple wardrobe and started for the sun. Her little figure at the gate the angels must have spied, since I could never find her upon the mortal side.
We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.
Words |
Angelique, with both hands open, lying limply on her knees, was giving herself. And Felicien remembered the evening on which she had run barefoot through the grass, so adorable that he had pursued her, and whispered in her ear, I love you. And he understood full well that only now had she replied, with the same cry, I love you. And he understood full well that only now had she replied, with the same cry, I love you, the eternal cry that had finally emerged from her wide-open heart. I love you... Take me, carry me away, I am yours.
Care | Cause | Crime | Day | Disgrace | Earth | Exploit | God | Important | Life | Life | Love | Mother | Nature | Pain | Suffering | Tears | World | God | Vice |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
I don't know if it be a peculiarity in me, but I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death, should no frenzied or despairing mourner share the duty with me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter--the eternity they have entered--where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fullness.
Distress | Grave | Heart | Life | Life | Light | Nothing | Past | Rest | Safe | Tears | Think |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
A heaven so clear, an earth so calm, so sweet, so soft, so hushed an air; and, deepening still the dreamlike charm, wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
Oh, I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors! I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free . . . and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills. Open the window again wide: fasten it open!