This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The man is perishable. It can, but perish in resistant, and if nothing we are booked, not do not that this is a justice!" - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"Whence comes to man the most sustainable of the pleasures of his heart, the pleasure of melancholy , this charming full of secrets , who is living his pain and s' love even in the sense of its ruin? [Where does the most enduring human enjoyments of his heart, the pleasure of melancholy, this charming full of secrets, which makes its living pain and still love the feeling of ruin?]" - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"Without doubt it is natural to include that love long what we love so much." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"A good snapshot stops a moment from running away." - Eudora Welty
"Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most." - Eudora Welty
"I don’t think we often see life resolving itself, not in any sort of perfect way, but I like the fiction writer’s feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art, however imperfectly and briefly—to give it a form and try to embody it—to hold it and express it in a story’s terms." - Eudora Welty
"It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction." - Eudora Welty
"My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!" - Eudora Welty
"After midlife, one falls back on C G Jung and determines that the first years of life were in themselves symbolic." - Eugen Drewermann
"In my eyes, concepts of theology have only as much value as they are able to interpret experience. It seems to me that we have long reached the point where we theologians only talk to ourselves and debate with our own history of concepts." - Eugen Drewermann
"He who suffers wins in politics. The martyr does not obtain the victory personally, but his group, his successors, win in the long run." - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
"Instead of asking, “Why does this happen Why do I feel left in the lurch” we can ask “How does it happen that there are people who sing with such confidence, ‘God’s strong name is our help’”" - Eugene Peterson
"I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!.. And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"It wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you anymore. ItÂ’s the foghorn I hate. It won't let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"It will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"LAVINIA: I love everything that grows simply-- up toward the sun-- everything that's straight and strong! I hate what's warped and twists and eats into itself and dies for a lifetime in shadow..." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"LAVINIA: I want to feel love! Love is all beautiful! I never used to know that! I was a fool! We'll be married soon... We'll make an island for ourselves on land and we'll have children and love them and teach them to love life so that they can never be possessed by hate and death!" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"Let him come! I have seen them come before -- at Margesfontein, Spion Kiopje, Modder River. Stepping into battle, left right left right, waving their silly swords, so afraid they couldn't show off how brave they was, and with mine rifle I kills them so easy! [General Wetjoen talking about the Boer War]" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid of love, I who love love? Why must I hide myself in self-contempt in order to understand? Why was I born without a skin, O God, that I must wear armor in order to touch or to be touched?" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"Why canÂ’t you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. YouÂ’ll find what youÂ’re trying to say in him- as youÂ’ll find everything else worth saying. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep.'' 'Fine! ThatÂ’s beautiful. But I wasnÂ’t trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so letÂ’s drink up and forget it. ThatÂ’s more my idea." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"You mustn't feel sorry for me. Don't you see I'm happy at last — free — free! — freed from the farm — free to wander on and on — eternally! Look! Isn't it beautiful beyond the hills? I can hear the old voices calling me to come — And this time I'm going! It isn't the end. It's a free beginning — the start of my voyage! I've won to my trip — the right of release — beyond the horizon! Oh, you ought to be glad — glad — for my sake!" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"You seem to be going in for sincerity today. It isn't becoming to you, really — except as an obvious pose. Be as artificial as you are, I advise. There's a sort of sincerity in that, you know. And, after all, you must confess you like that better." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"Apparently, "conspiracy stuff" is now shorthand for unspeakable truth." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"I did think of marrying once, and I explained it on ‘The Dick Cavett Show’ in 1968. It was right after those debates with Bill Buckley during the conventions. I told Cavett that I once planned to marry Joanne Woodward. ‘What went wrong?’ Cavett asked. I told him that Joanne met Paul Newman and I met Bill Buckley." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority)." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"The average "educated" American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past. That is why it is not really possible to compare a writer like Howells with any living American writer because Howells thought that it was a good thing to know as much as possible about his own country as well as other countries while our writers today, in common with the presidents and paint manufacturers, live in a present without past among signs whose meanings are uninterpretable." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"Young people are more hopeful at a certain age than adults, but I suspect that's glandular. As for children, I keep as far from them as possible. I don't like the sight of them. The scale is all wrong. The heads tend to be too big for their bodies, and the hands and feet are a disaster. They keep falling into things. The nakedness of their bad character! We adults have learned how to disguise our terrible character, but children, well, they are like grotesque drawings of us. They should be neither seen nor heard, and no one must make another one." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"I would no more teach children military training than teach them arson, robbery, or assassination." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"If you wish to know what justice is, let injustice pursue you. When you cannot be just because of your nature, be so through your pride." - Eugenio Maria de Hostos (y Bonilla)
"But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty." - Eugenio Montale
"I often think of the beautiful Turin, where sweet must feel to live." - Eugenio Montale
"Along with success comes a reputation for wisdom." - Euripedes NULL
"Glittering hope is immemorial and beckons many men to their undoing." - Euripedes NULL
"He is wise that is wise to himself." - Euripedes NULL
"I sacrifice to no god save myself — And to my belly, greatest of deities." - Euripedes NULL
"It is said that gifts persuade even the gods." - Euripedes NULL
"My tongue swore, but my mind is not on oath." - Euripedes NULL
"Old menÂ’s prayers for death are lying prayers, in which they abuse old age and long extent of life. But when death draws near, not one is willing to die, and age no longer is a burden to them." - Euripedes NULL
"Soon all of you immortals Will be as dead as we are! Come on then, what are you waiting for? Have you run out of thunderbolts?" - Euripedes NULL
"Sufficiency's enough for men of sense." - Euripedes NULL
"When one receives the generosity of the gods, do not need it to friends, as sufficient for divine help, if God willing!" - Euripedes NULL
"The beard, conformable to the notion of my friend Sir Roger, was for many ages looked upon as the type of wisdom. Lucian more than once rallies the philosophers of his time, who endeavored to rival one another in beards; and represents a learned man who stood for a professorship in philosophy, as unqualified for it by the shortness of his beard." - Eustace Budgell
"Those who have searched into human nature observe that nothing so much shows the nobleness of the soul, as that its felicity consists in action. Every man has such an active principle in him that he will find out something to employ himself upon, in whatever place or state of life he is posted." - Eustace Budgell
"We see by these instances what homage the world has formerly paid to beards; and that a barber was not then allowed to make those depredations on the faces of the learned which have been permitted him of late years." - Eustace Budgell
"I often play on the cello-bass side of the orchestra, because I prefer the deep sounds. I can't hear the violins well." - Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie