This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
There is affection in every employment, and it gives the spirit energy, and keeps the mind intent upon its work or study. This if it be not relaxed, becomes dull, and its earnestness flags,—as salt that has lost its savor, so that it has no pungency or relish; or as bended bow, which unless it be unbent, loses the power that it derives from its elasticity.
It costs me never a stab nor squirm to tread by chance upon a worm. Aha, my little dear, I say, your clan will pay me back one day.
I find her anecdotes more efficacious than sheep-counting, rain on a tin roof, or alanol tablets.... you will find me and Morpheus, off in a corner, necking.
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
A work of art is a corner of nature seen through a temperament.
He wept for truth which was dead, for heaven which was void. Beyond the marble walls and gleaming jeweled altars, the huge plaster Christ had no longer a single drop of blood in its veins.
A god of kindness would be charitable to all. Your god of wrath and punishment is but a monstrous phantasy... It is not necessary that one should humble oneself to deserve assistance, it is sufficient that one should suffer.
Crime | Duty | History | Insult | Justice | Society | Suffering | Truth | Insult | Society |
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Some keep the Sabbath going to church, I keep it staying at home, with a bobolink for a chorister, and an orchard for a dome.
And that wretched creature without hands or feet, who had to be put to bed and fed like a child, that pitiable remnant of a man, whose almost vanished life was nothing more than one scream of pain, cried out in furious indignation: 'What a fool one must be to go and kill oneself!' - 'Joy of Life
And then there was pain and blood and tears, all those things that cause suffering and revolt, the killing of Françoise, the killing of Fouan, vice triumphing, and the stinking, bloodthirsty peasants, vermin who disgrace and exploit the earth. But can you really know? Just as the frost that burns the crops, the hail that chops them down, the thunderstorms which batter them are all perhaps necessary, maybe blood and tears are needed to keep the world going. And how important is human misery when weighed against the mighty mechanism of the stars and the sun? What does God care for us? We earn our bread only by dint of a cruel struggle, day in, day out. And only the earth is immortal, the Great Mother from whom we spring and to whom we return, love of whom can drive us to crime and through whom life is perpetually preserved for her own inscrutable ends, in which even our wretched degraded nature has its part to play.
Good | Life | Life | People | Promise | Right | Thought | Will | Thought |
All of a sudden, in the good-natured child, the woman stood revealed, a disturbing woman with all the impulsive madness of her sex, opening the gates of the unknown world of desire. Nana was still smiling, but with the deadly smile of a man-eater.
He mused on this village of his, which had sprung up in this place, amid the stones, like the gnarled undergrowth of the valley. All Artaud's inhabitants were inter-related, all bearing the same surname to such an extent that they used double-barrelled names from the cradle up, to distinguish one from another. At some antecedent date an ancestral Artaud had come like an outcast, to establish himself in this waste land. His family had grown with the savage vitality of the vegetation, drawing nourishment from this stone till it had become a tribe, then the tribe turned to a community, till they could not sort out their cousinage, going back for generations. They inter-married with unblushing promiscuity.
Body |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
All seems smooth and easy: where is the obstacle?' 'Here! and here!' replied Catherine, striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast, 'in whichever place the soul lives.
Plenty |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death... I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter--the Eternity they have entered--where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fullness.