This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Day is the Child of Time, And Day must cease to be: But Night is without a sire, And cannot expire, One with Eternity.
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
The next night from the Flock came Kirk Maynard Gull, wobbling across the sand, ragging his leftwing, to collapse at Jonathan's feet. Help me, he said very quietly, speaking in the way that the dying speak. I want to fly more than anything else in the world... Come along then. said Jonathan. Climb with me away from the ground, and we'll begin. You don't understand My wing. I can't move my wing. Maynard Gull, you have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way. It is the Law of the Great Gull, the Law that Is. Are you saying I can fly? I say you are free.
Freedom | Law | Nothing | Understand |
Pandurang Shastri Athavale, fully Pandurang Vaijnath Shastri Athavale
Expression of Gratitude to the Lord Almighty at these occassions daily; For gift of Memory at dawn, For the gift of Energy at meal times, and for the gift of Peace at night is called Trikal Sandhya.
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
Lose not a moment's chance of contemplating beauty; each of these seconds while the day changes into night is precious; in this is life. I go out into the fields and hills, in the sunshine and the air, and I become full of certain thoughts and feelings: I return towards the houses and find every one of those aspirations and ideas jarred upon.
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
Above the elms, all the stars in turn, shining in the night. The shadow of Venus, mighty Orion and brilliant Sirius, the bright constellations, the great and lesser dog, Orion's belt and Orion's hound; Arcturus, brilliant star in Bootes, and Capella, so bright in summer, as each in their turn they shone over the elms. They shone in my mind, they became part of my life. The beauty of the night sky is not to be written, but it was felt. Above the elms, all the stars in their turn, beneath the mild airs of summers, in the cold crisp frosts of winter, I watched them above the elms, shining in the sky. They brought to me the thought of greatness of soul. Alone with my thought beneath the stars I prayed in the night. The hours illuminated by the stars were full of beauty and of deep soul prayer.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
One of the most impressive discoveries was the origin of the energy of the stars that makes them continue to burn. One of the men who discovered this was out with his girlfriend the night after he realized that nuclear reactions must be going on in the stars in order to make them shine. She said, 'Look how pretty the stars shine!' He said, 'Yes, and right now I am the only man in the world who knows why they shine.' She merely laughed at him. She was not impressed with being out with the only man, who, at that moment, knew why the stars shine. Well it is sad to be alone, but that is the way of the world.
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
By night the stars shine, and there is no fathoming the dark spaces between these brilliant points, nor the thoughts that come as it were between the fixed stars and landmarks of the mind.
I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.
Glory follows afflictions, not as the day follows the night but as the spring follows the winter; for the winter prepares the earth for the spring, so do afflictions sanctified prepare the soul for glory.
Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright
In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the ells and the screams that filled the air.
Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright
Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.
Hunger |
Richard E. Byrd, fully Richard Evelyn Byrd, Jr.
I paused to listen to the silence. My breath, crystallized as it passed my cheeks, drifted on a breeze gentler than a whisper. The wind vane pointed toward the South Pole. Presently the wind cups ceased their gentle turning as the cold killed the breeze. My frozen breath hung like a cloud overhead. The day was dying, the night was being born-but with great peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence-a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps. It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man's oneness with the universe. The conviction came that that rhythm was too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance-that, therefore, there must be purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental offshoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of a man's despair and found it groundless. . . . For those who seek it, there is inexhaustible evidence of an all-pervading intelligence. Man is not alone.
Day | Despair | Doubt | Enough | Evidence | Heart | Man | Music | Oneness | Purpose | Purpose |
This was a distilled essence of life; this was the way people behaved when they took off the masks which all adults seemed to me to wear; this was noble. A veil had been rent between the greatness of mankind and myself, and I knew that I would never be the same again. Nor was I. Since that night I have made some progress in my attempt to understand mankind, but I have never made another such giant leap.
Greatness | Mankind | People | Progress | Understand |
It is popularly believed that our grandmothers were unathletic, but no girl who operated a parlour organ lacked exercise, pumping with her feet, clawing at the Vox Humana and Celeste stops with her hands and wagging her head to keep time. But the parlour organ went out when short skirts came in. Many a young fellow of the nineties, charmed by his girl's command of her organ, married her, only to discover on his wedding night that she had legs like an eight-day bicycle racer
Each seed throws itself out down before the dawn, And the night opens itself out behind it, And inside its own center it lives!
What is life, when wanting love? Night without a morning; love's the cloudless summer sun, nature gay adorning.
Nature |
When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud And goes down burning into the gulf below, No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud At what has happened. Birds, at least must know It is the change to darkness in the sky. Murmuring something quiet in her breast, One bird begins to close a faded eye; Or overtaken too far from his nest, Hurrying low above the grove, some waif Swoops just in time to his remembered tree. At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe! Now let the night be dark for all of me. Let the night be too dark for me to see Into the future. Let what will be, be.
The Book, this Holy Book, on every line, Mark'd with the seal of high divinity, On every leaf bedew'd with drops of love Divine, and with the eternal heraldry And signature of God Almighty stamp'd From first to last; this ray of sacred light, This lamp, from off the everlasting throne, Mercy took down, and in the night of time Stood, casting on the dark her gracious bow; And evermore beseeching men With tears And earnest sighs, to read, believe and live.