This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The day before yesterday, in the woods of Touques, in a charming spot beside a spring, I found old cigar butts and scraps of pƒt‚. People had been picnicking. I described such a scene in Novembre eleven years ago; it was entirely imagined, and the other day it came true. Everything one invents is true, you may be sure. Poetry is as precise as geometry. Induction is as accurate as deduction; and besides, after reaching a certain point one no longer makes any mistake about the things of the soul.
Will |
I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
Will |
She was pale all over, white as a sheet. The skin was drawn tight over her nose. She had a vague look in the eyes. And because she discovered three grey hairs on her temples, she talked about being an old woman.
Will |
If you participate in life, you don?t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubbornness in denying that maxim.
One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
Will |
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
Better | Fear | Relationship | Will | World |
She's gasping for love like a carp on a kitchen table gasping for water.
Will |
Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.
Heart |
The primacy of faith was followed by the "primacy of charity." ... But paradoxically, at the same time this was also partially responsible for the fact that for some the relationship with God was obscured and became difficult to live out and understand. Today, due partly perhaps to such impasses, the perspective of a new primacy seems to be emerging - that of hope, which liberates history because of its openness to the God who is to come.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
Heart |
Why, it was the romances she had read in her youth! It was Walter Scott back again! She seemed to catch, through the mist, the sound of the Scottish bagpipes skirling among the heather. And the memory of the book helping her to understand the libretto, she followed each successive stage in the plot, while all the time a host of vague, indefinable thoughts came thronging in upon her, only to take flight at every 'crescendo' of the music.
Heart |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
How far the gentlemen of dark complexion will get with their independence, now that they have declared it, I don?t know. There are serious difficulties in their way. The vast majority of people of their race are but two or three inches removed from gorillas: it will be a sheer impossibility, for a long, long while, to interest them in anything above pork-chops and bootleg gin.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
If Wall Street really wants to dispose of John L. Lewis, let it invite him to a swell feed, hand him a fifty-cent cigar with a torpedo in it, and so burn off his eyebrows.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Believed in heroes and Nietzsche, in his youth, he was a hero worshiper. First Arthur Schopenhauer's bespectacled visage stared from his shrine and after que the place of sacredness and honor was held by Richard Wagner. When the Wagner of the philosopher's dreams turned into a very prosaic Wagner of flesh and blood, there came a time of doubt and stress and suffering for poor Nietzsche. But he had courage as well as loyalty, and in the end he dashed his idol to pieces and the bit crunched underfoot.