This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed Art has remembered the people, because they created.
Let us not fear that the issues of natural science shall be scepticism or anarchy. - Through all God's works there runs a beautiful harmony. - The remotest truth in his universe is linked to that which lies nearest the throne.
Sorrow |
Eldridge Cleaver, fully Leroy Eldridge Cleaver
Pig power in America was infuriating, but pig power in the communist framework was awesome and unaccountable.
When you see a hand from afar, Kimya, can you do that there is only one school. But you dive into the water, you realize that there is more than a river. The river is hidden inside various currents and they all run in harmony, yet are completely separate from one another.
Belief | Books | Destroy | Force | God | Good | Insanity | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Need | People | Philosophy | Religion | Taste | Time | Words | God | Understand |
One thing that has helped me personally in the past was to stop interfering with the people around me and getting frustrated when I couldn’t change them. Instead of intrusion and passivity, may I suggest submission? Some people make the mistake of confusing submission with weakness, whereas it is anything but. Submission is a form of peaceful acceptance of the terms of the universe, including the things we are currently unable to change or comprehend.
Balance | Conscience | Ends | Journey | Right | Style | Woman |
Eleanor Brown, fully Nora Eleanor Louisa Hervey Brown
We wear our names heavily. And though we have tried to escape their influence, they have seeped into us, and we find ourselves living their patterns again and again.
We have trivialized this park, residents make too little use of it, and tourists don't know where it is, ... Neither the city or the federal government has bothered to make maximum use of it. The problem is that it had no plan and it's in a state of great deterioration.
Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen
Visitors took form gradually in his household, coming out of a haze of rumor, and seemed but lightly, pleasantly superimposed on the vital pattern till a departure tore great shreds from the season’s texture… There was to be no opportunity for what he must not say to be rather painfully not said.
Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen
The slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon
Illusion |
I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me to not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough--but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
Computer | Day | Earth | Humanity | Life | Life | Little | Music | Nature | Nothing | People | Television | Time | World |
Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody—so utterly well-known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?
Hell |
The little fishing boat anchors right off the shore of Gili Meno. There are no docks here on this island. You have to roll up your pants, jump off the boat and wade in through the surf on your own power. There's absolutely no way to do this without getting soaking wet or even banged up on the coral, but it's worth all the trouble because the beach here is so beautiful, so special.
Talking |
Man is by nature a pragmatic materialist, a mechanic, a lover of gadgets and gadgetry; and these are the qualities that characterize the "establishment" which regulates modern society: pragmatism, materialism, mechanization, and gadgetry. Woman, on the other hand, is a practical idealist, a humanitarian with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, an altruist rather than a capitalist.
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 |
In the pathway of the sun, in the footsteps of the breeze, where the world and sky are one, he shall ride the silver seas, he shall cut the glittering wave. I shall sit at home, and rock; rise, to heed a neighbor's knock; brew my tea, and snip my thread; bleach the linen for my bed. They will call him brave.
History |
The days will rally, wreathing their crazy tarantelle; and you must go on breathing, but I'll be safe in hell. Like January weather, the years will bite and smart, and pull your bones together to wrap your chattering heart. The pretty stuff you're made of will crack and crease and dry. The thing you are afraid of will look from every eye. You will go faltering after the bright, imperious line, and split your throat on laughter, and burn your eyes with brine. You will be frail and musty with peering, furtive head, whilst I am young and lusty among the roaring dead.
Children |
One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was ‘gravely disabled.’ To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven.