This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Oh, Lord - responsibility. That word worked on me until I worked on it, until I looked at it carefully and broke it down into the two words that make its true definition: the ability to respond.
Wanting to get married, for me, is all about a desire to feel chosen. She went on to write that while the concept of building a life together with another adult was appealing, what really pulled at her heart was the desire for a wedding, a public event that will unequivocally prove to everyone, especially to myself, that I am precious enough to have been selected by somebody forever.
Argument | Convention | Enough | Existence | Life | Life | Nothing | Tradition | Will |
Elizabeth Janeway, born Elizabeth Ames Hall
The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.
What time has ever been a simple time for those who are living it?
Existence | Forgiveness | Fortitude | Talking | Understanding | Forgiveness |
All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.
Getting up in the middle of the night, I walked around my room with the certainty of being chosen and criminal, a double privilege natural to the sleepless, revolting or incomprehensible for the captives of daytime logic.
Existence | Forgiveness | Happy | Light | Soul | Will | Forgiveness |
I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.
Awareness | Curiosity | Existence | Impossibility | Awareness |
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
I wonder if it hurts to live, and if they have to try, and whether, could they choose between, they would not rather die.
It was always the same; other people gave up loving before she did. They got spoilt, or else they went away; in any case, they were partly to blame. Why did it happen so? She herself never changed; when she loved anyone, it was for life. She could not understand desertion; it was something so huge, so monstrous that the notion of it made her little heart break.
Crime | Defense | Existence | Important | Justification | War |
Denise came to the foot of the Saint-Lazare, where a train of Cherbourg had landed with his two brothers station after a night on the hard seat of a third-class carriage. She held him by the hand Pepe and John followed her every three broken the trip, bewildered and lost in the middle of the vast Paris, nose up on houses, asking every corner of the street Michodière in which their uncle Baudu remained. But as she finally uncorked the Gaillon up, the girl stopped short of surprise.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
Time brought resignation and a melancholy sweeter than common joy.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
So he'll never know how much love: not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself, than I own. I do not know that our souls are made, but they are equal, and Linton is as different from mine as a moonbeam is different from lightning, fire or ice.
Cause | Danger | Distinction | Enough | Existence | Fear | Heart | Life | Life | Regard | Sincerity | Danger | Trouble | Think |
Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.
Coercion | Dignity | Effort | Existence | Freedom | Individual | Initiative | Labor | Life | Life | Man | Murder | People | Sense | Submission | Terrorism | Tyranny | Murder | Value |
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
To become conscious of a being is then always for that being to be grasped across an ideality and on the basis of a said. Eyen an empirical, individual being is broached across the ideality of logos. Subjectivity qua consciousness can thus be interpreted as the articulation of an ontological event, as one of the mysterious ways in which its 'act of being' is deployed.
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
What exists for us, what we consider as existing is not a reality hidden behind phenomena that appear as images or signs of this reality. The world of phenomena it-self makes up the being of our concrete life.
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
But anarchy is not disorder as opposed to order, as the eclipse of themes is not, as js said, a return to a diffuse 'field of consciousness' prior to attention. Disorder is but another order, and what is diffuse is thematizable. Anarchy troubles being over and beyond these alternatives.
Existence | Life | Life | Meaning | Model | Order | Reality |
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
It is as though subjective life in the form of consciousness consisted in being itself losing itself and finding itself again so as to possess itself by showing itself, proposing itself as a theme, exposing itself in truth.
Existence | Freedom | Pain | Phenomena | Solitude | Sorrow | Work |