This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.
The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity; the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous — tedium.
Men |
I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.
Birth | Ends | Experience | Heart | Men | Parents | Plan | Tenderness | Think |
Sometimes I think I'll give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan all day.
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
The angels taken collectively are called heaven, for they constitute heaven; and yet that which makes heaven in general and in particular is the Divine that goes forth from the Lord and flows into the angels and is received by them.
Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key
For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life.
A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.
Men |
Two thirds of human existence are wasted in hesitation.
In love as in speculation there is much filth; in love also, people think only of their own gratification; yet without love there would be no life, and the world would come to an end.
Despair | Destroy | Effort | Good | Honor | Innocence | Life | Life | Man | Men | Office | Order | People | Public | Society | War | Society |
Well then! it was the end; his ruin was complete. Even if he mended the cables and lit the fires, where would he find men? Another fortnight's strike and he would be bankrupt. And in this certainty of disaster he no longer felt any hatred of the Montsou bandits; he felt that all had a hand in it, that it was a general agelong fault. They were brutes, no doubt, but brutes who could not read, and who were dying of hunger.
The Revolution of 1848 found all the Rougons on the lookout, frustrated by their bad luck, and ready to use any means necessary to advance their cause. They were a family of bandits lying in wait, ready to plunder and steal.
Affront | Deeds | Indignation | Language | Men | Need | Nothing | People | Public | Punishment | Rank | Remorse | Thought | Traitor | Deeds | Thought |
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Pardon my sanity in a world insane.