This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"If we must part forever, give me but one kind word to think upon and please myself with, while my heart's breaking." - Thomas Otway
"Just as life begins at any moment, through an act of realization, so the work. But each beginning, whether of book page, paragraph, sentence or phrase, marks a vital connection, and it is in the vitality, the durability, the timelessness and changelessness of the thoughts and events that I plunge anew each time. Every line and word is vitally connected with my life, my life only, be it in the form of deed, event, fact, thought, emotion, desire, evasion, frustration, dream, revery, vagary, even the unfinished nothings which float listlessly in the brain like the snapped filaments of a spider’s web. There is nothing really vague or tenuous — even the nothingnessses are sharp, tough, definite, durable. Like the spider I return again and again to the task, conscious that the web I am spinning is made of my own substance, that it will never fail me, never run dry." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"Creation is thus God's presence in creatures. The Greek Orthodox theologian Philip Sherrard has written that Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God's hidden Being. This means that we and all other creatures live by a sanctity that is inexpressibly intimate, for to every creature, the gift of life is a portion of the breath and spirit of God. (pg. 308, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)" - Wendell Berry
"The comedy of hollow sounds derives from truth and not from satire on our lives." - Wallace Stevens
"But then what should I have done with you, Nina, how should I have disposed of the store of sadness that had gradually accumulated as a result of our seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings?" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Stand upright, speak thy thoughts, declare the truth thou hast, that all may share; be bold, proclaim it everywhere: they only live who dare." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"They who say all men are equal speak an undoubted truth, if they mean that all have an equal right to liberty, to their property, and to their protection of the laws. - But they are mistaken if they think men are equal in their station and employments, since they are not so by their talents." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"He had the ability to bring a precious, authentic feminine ability to make his own world in any of it was." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Hence, Orlando and Sasha, as he called her for short, and because it was the name of a white Russian fox he had had as a boy—a creature soft as snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so savagely that his father had it killed—hence they had the river to themselves. Hot with skating and with love they would throw themselves down in some solitary reach, where the yellow osiers fringed the bank, and wrapped in a great fur cloak Orlando would take her in his arms, and know, for the first time, he murmured, the delights of love. Then, when the ecstasy was over and they lay lulled in a swoon on the ice, he would tell her of his other loves, and how, compared with her, they had been of wood, of sackcloth, and of cinders. And laughing at his vehemence, she would turn once more in his arms and give him, for love’s sake, one more embrace. And then they would marvel that the ice did not melt with their heat, and pity the poor old woman who had no such natural means of thawing it, but must hack at it with a chopper of cold steel. And then, wrapped in their sables, they would talk of everything under the sun; of sights and travels; of Moor and Pagan; of this man’s beard and that woman’s skin; of a rat that fed from her hand at table; of the arras that moved always in the hall at home; of a face; of a feather. Nothing was too small for such converse, nothing was too great." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"The fundamental conflicts in human life are not between competing ideas – one of which is true and the other false, but rather, between those that hold power and use it to oppress others, and those who are oppressed by power and seed to free themselves of it." - Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz
"We must remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who is trained in the severest school." - Thucydides NULL
"There is no praise we have not lavished upon prudence; and yet she cannot assure to us the most trifling event." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"What causes such a miscalculation in the amount of gratitude which men expect for the favors they have done, is, that the pride of the giver and that of the receiver can never agree as to the value of the benefit." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Once more, adieu. The rest let sorrow say." - William Shakespeare
"Oh, I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors! I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free . . . and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills. Open the window again wide: fasten it open!" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"A man should take to himself no discomfort from an opinion expressed or implied by his adversary, but it is difficult, and oftentimes humiliating to attempt to justify the kindness of one's friends." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs