This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Little Words when you are gone, there is nor bloom nor leaf, nor singing sea at night, nor silver birds; and I can only stare, and shape my grief in little words. I cannot conjure loveliness, to drown the bitter woe that racks my cords apart. The weary pen that sets my sorrow down feeds at my heart. There is no mercy in the shifting year, no beauty wraps me tenderly about. I turn to little words- so you, my dear, can spell them out.
I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that anymore.
If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
A soft Sea washed around the House a Sea of Summer Air and rose and fell the magic Planks that sailed without a care — for Captain was the Butterfly for Helmsman was the Bee and an entire universe for the delighted crew.
Dreams | Knowledge | Literature | Pleasure | Old |
Years and years to waken from that sleep in which the others loll; then years and years to scape that awakening...
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Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
I'm happiest when most away I can bear my soul from its home of clay on a windy night when the moon is bright aAnd the eye can wander through worlds of light— when I am not and none beside— nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky—but only spirit wandering wide through infinite immensity.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
While enjoying a month of fine weather at the sea-coast, I was thrown into the company of a most fascinating creature: a real goddess in my eyes, as long as she took no notice of me. I 'never told my love' vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears: she understood me at last, and looked a return - the sweetest of all imaginable looks. And what did I do? I confess it with shame - shrunk icily into myself, like a snail; at every glance retired colder and farther; till finally the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses, and, overwhelmed with confusion at her supposed mistake, persuaded her mamma to decamp. By this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness; how undeserved, I alone can appreciate.
Art | Change | Danger | Darkness | Doubt | Dreams | Grief | Guile | Hate | Heart | Hope | Liberty | Life | Life | Pain | Quiet | Reason | Suffering | Suspicion | Thankfulness | Trust | Truth | World | Danger | Art |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
Riches I hold in light esteem, and love I laugh to scorn, and lust of fame was but a dream that vanished with the morn. And if I pray, the only prayer that moves my lips for me is, 'Leave the heart that now I bear, and give me liberty!' Yes, as my swift days near their goal, 'tis all that I implore - in life and death, a chainless soul, with courage to endure.
I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things.' Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
Nay, you'll be ashamed of me every day of your life, he answered; and the more ashamed, the more you know me; and I cannot bide it.
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Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
If to be means to exist the way nature does, then everything which is given as refractory to the categories and to the mode of existence of nature will, as such, have no objectivity and will be, a priori and unavoidably, reduced to something natural.
Books | Character | Life | Life | Woman | Old Testament | Old |
You are not happy because you are well. You are well because you are happy. You are not depressed because trouble has come to you, but trouble has come to you because you are depressed. You can change your thoughts and feelings, and then the outer things will come to correspond, and indeed there is no other way of working.
Books | Day | God | Nature | Power | Teach | Truth | Will | Following | God | Learn | Think | Truths |
What will you do with the lazy ones, who would not work?' No one is lazy. They grow hopeless from the misery of their present existence, and give up. Under our order of things, every men would do the work he liked, and would have as much as his neighbor, so could not be unhappy and discouraged.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
As a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor School of Creative mathematics, I honestly do not know how old I am
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
It was a bitter moment for us. We weren't two mature parents. We were just two kids playing grown-up. We still needed Mommy and Daddy's permission, blessings, and money to survive.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
There is a rumor that seven states are considering overpruning as a cause for divorce, second only to incompatibility and adultery. I hope our state is one of them. No judge would dare deny me freedom after he heard the story of my privet hedge.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
For part of it is the smell that comes when, on a ship, there is a storm and the portholes are closed up. Put your nose against the brass handle of a screwed-tight porthole on a rolling ship that is swaying under you so that you are faint and hollow in the stomach and you have a part of that smellÂ… After that of the ship you must go down the hill in Madrid to the Puente de Toldedo early in the morning to the matadero and stand there on the wet paving when there is a fog from the Manzanares and wait for the old women who go before daylight to drink the blood of the beasts that are slaughtered. When such an old woman comes out of the matadero, holding her shawl around her, with her face gray and her eyes hollow, and the whiskers of age on her chin, and on her cheeks, set in the waxen white of her face as the sprouts grow from the seed of a bean, not bristles, but pale sprouts in the death of her face; put your arms tight around her Ingles, and hold her to you and kiss her on the mouth and you will know the second part that odor is made ofÂ… Kiss one, Pilar said. Kiss one, Ingles, for thy knowledgeÂ’s sake and then, with this in thy nostrils, walk back up into the city and when thous seest a refuse pail with dead flowers [chrysanthemums] in it plunge thy nose deep into it and inhale so that scent mixes with those thou hast already in thy nasal passagesÂ… Then, Pilar went on, it is important that the day be in the autumn with rain, or at least some fog, or early winter even and now thou shouldst continue to walk through the city and down the Called de Salud smelling what thou wilt smell where they are sweeping out the casas de putas and emptying the slop jars into the drains and, with this odor of loveÂ’s labor lost mixed sweetly with soapy water and cigarette butts only faintly reaching thy nostrils, thou shouldst go on to the Jardin Botanico where at night those girls who can no longer work in the houses do their work against the iron gates of the park and the iron picketed fences and upon the sidewalks. It is there in the shadow of the trees against the iron railing that they will perform all that a man wishes; from the simplest requests at a remuneration of ten centimos up to a peseta for that great act that we are born to and there, on a dead flower bed that has not yet been plucked out and replanted, and so serves to soften the earth that is so much softer than the sidewalk, thou wilt find an abandoned gunny sack with the odor of the wet earth, the dead flowers, and the doings of that night. In this sack will be contained the essence of it all, both the dead earth and the dead stalks of the flowers and their rotted blooms and the smell that is both the death and birth of man. Thou wild wrap this sack around thy head and try to breathe through it. No. Yes, Pilar said. Thou wilt wrap this sack around thy head and try to breath and then, if thou hast not lost any of the previous odors, when thou inhalest deeply, thou wilt smell the odor of death-to-come as we know it.
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