This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something ? the eternal ?what?s the use?? ? sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.
Matters of deeper import seemed to seek utterance in the expression of their eyes. They tried to speak of ordinary, everyday things, but all the while they felt a mutual languor stealing into their inmost being. It was like a murmur of the soul, deep down, persistent, dominating the spoken word. Lost in wonder at the strange sweetness that stole upon their senses, they never spoke of it to one another or sought to probe its cause. Coming delights, like the shores of tropic isles, exhale across the spreading seas their perfume-laden airs, the native softness of the clime; and they who breathe them, their spirits lulled as if by wine, scan not, nor try to scan, the faint, far-off horizon.
Need |
It's splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts.
That was how they would have liked to be: what they were doing was to dream up ideals and then refashion their past lives to match them. Speech is a rolling-machine that always stretches the feelings it expresses.
Wants |
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.
In the tragedy in question, for example, he condemned the ideas but admired the style, abhorred the conception but praised all the details, found the characters impossible but their speeches marvelous
One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
Learn | Understand |
The brazen arms were working more quickly. They paused no longer. Every time that a child was placed in them the priests of Moloch spread out their hands upon him to burden him with the crimes of the people, vociferating: "They are not men but oxen!" and the multitude round about repeated: "Oxen! oxen!" The devout exclaimed: "Lord! Eat!"
My novel is the rock to which I cling and I know nothing of what is taking place in the world.
Need |
Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.
Heart |
She recognized the passion and the pain whereof she had all but died. The voice of the heroine seemed but the echo of her own heart, and the lovely illusion before her, part and parcel of her life. But no one on earth had ever loved 'her' with such a love as that.
Wants |
In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was smiling, his chin down, his nostrils distended. He seemed lost in the kind of happiness which, as a rule, accompanies only those mediocre occupations that tickle the intelligence with easy difficulties, and satisfy it with a sense of achievement beyond which there is nothing left for dreams to feed on.
In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ?I don?t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don?t see what use he is.
So from now on the days were going to continue one after the other like this, always the same, innumerable, bringing nothing!... It was God's will. The future was a pitch-black tunnel, ending in a locked door. She gave up her music: why should she play? Who was there to listen?... She left her drawing books and her embroidery in a closet. What was the use of anything? What was the use?
Poor little thing! She's gasping for love like a carp on a kitchen table gasping for water.
Story |
The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.
Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra
People say that having three orchestras is a crazy life, but it's better because you have three families. I want to have my own kids very soon. In future, I still want to conduct a lot, but less, to be with my family.
Waiting |
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 |
The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.
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 |