This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"When he has nothing to say, he lets words speak." - Elias Canetti
"Fate does not mean that your life is destined. Therefore, it is a sign of complete ignorance to leave everything to fate and not contributing actively to the music of the universe. ... Your destiny - it is the level where you play your tune. Unlikely to change tools, but depends solely on how well you'll play." - Elif Safak
"She would have made Hercules have turned spit, yea, and have cleft his club to make the fire too." - William Shakespeare
"And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"But gay marriage is coming to America first and foremost because marriage here is a secular concern, not a religious one. The objection to gay marriage is almost invariably biblical, but nobody's legal vows in this country are defined by interpretation of biblical verse - or at least, not since the Supreme Court stood up for Richard and Mildred Loving. A church wedding ceremony is a nice thing, but it is neither required for legal marriage in America nor does it constitute legal marriage in America. What constitutes legal marriage in this country is that critical piece of paper that you and your betrothed must sign and then register with the state. The morality of your marriage may indeed rest between you and God, but it's that civic and secular paperwork which makes your vows official here on earth. Ultimately, then, it is the business of America's courts, not America's churches, to decide the rules of matrimonial law, and it is in those courts that the same-sex marriage debate will finally be settled." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"My hypersensitive awareness of time's speed led me to push myself to experience life at a maximum pace. If I were going to have such a short visit on earth, I had to do everything possible to experience it now." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Oh, the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"Emily Post's Etiquette is out again, this time in a new and an enlarged edition, and so the question of what to do with my evenings has been all fixed up for me." - Dorothy Parker
"I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see." - Dorothy Parker
"The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men." - Emile Zola
"When we remember that God really is omnipotent, untrammeled by what we call time or space or matter, or the vagaries of human nature, it is easy to see that there can be no limit to the power of prayer. You can pray about a problem and solve it at any stage, but of course the earlier you tackle it the easier your work will be." - Emmet Fox
"Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice." - Evgeny Morozov
"A great believer in precedent,' Della Street said. 'I think if he were ever confronted with a really novel situation he'd faint. He runs to his law books, digs around like a mole and finally comes up with case that's what he calls on all fours and was decided seventy-five or a hundred years ago." - Erle Stanley Gardner
"There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt. And how do you know laughter if there is no pain to compare it with?" - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
"Age is my alarm clock, the old man said. Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"But then we did not think of ourselves as poor. We did not accept it. we thought we were superior people and other people that we looked down on and rightly mistrusted were rich." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"Every year, something in you dies when the leaves fall from the trees, and the bare branches of the defenseless, swaying in the wind in the cold winter sunshine. But you know that spring will come, just as you are sure that the frozen river again freed from the ice. But when the cold rain poured incessantly and killed the spring, it seems as if for nothing ruined young lives... At that time I already knew that when something ends in life, whether good or bad, there is a void. But the void left after bad, fills itself. Void after something good can be filled, only to find something better." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"He took the bait like a male and he pulls like a male and his fight has no panic in it. I wonder if he has any plans or if he is just as desperate as I sin?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"He was going to sleep a little while. He lay still and death was not there. It must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtleÂ’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed animals" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"This was the greatest gift that he had, the talent that fitted him for war; that ability not to ignore but to despise whatever bad ending there could be. This quality was destroyed by too much responsibility for others or the necessity of undertaking something ill planned or badly conceived. For in such things the bad ending, failure, could not be ignored. It was not simply a possibility of harm to one's self, which could be ignored. He knew he himself was nothing, and he knew death was nothing. He knew that truly, as truly as he knew anything. In the last few days he had learned that he himself, with another person, could be everything. But inside himself he knew that this was the exception. That we have had, he thought. In that I have been most fortunate. That was given to me, perhaps, because I never asked for it. That cannot be taken away nor lost. But that is over and done with now on this morning and what there is to do now is our work." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writerÂ’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a manÂ’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"This is the Cuzco asking you to pull on your armor and, mounted on the ample back of a powerful horse, cleave a path through the defenseless flesh of a naked Indian flock whose human wall collapses and disappears beneath the four hooves of the galloping beast." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
"In order to be one, you must first be two." - Esther Perel
"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
"Just now they kissed, with India coming up close on her toes to see if she could tell yet what there was about a kiss." - 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
"Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists." - Eudora Welty
"The Bible makes it clear that every time that there is a story of faith, it is completely original. God's creative genius is endless." - Eugene Peterson
"The Bible never refers to the past as “the good old days.”" - Eugene Peterson
"The value of rhythms in our lives." - Eugene Peterson
"For this reason a man truly modest is as much so when he is alone as in company, and as subject to a blush in his closet as when the eyes of multitudes are upon him." - Eustace Budgell
"I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"IÂ’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I canÂ’t shut myself out from His mercy." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"The secret to missionary work is work. Work, work, work!" - Ezra Taft Benson
"Poor little thing! She's gasping for love like a carp on a kitchen table gasping for water." - Gustave Flaubert
"She pulled up short and jerked the bit from her mouth. Her mind, so material amidst its enthusiasm--she who had loved the church for its flowers, music for the words of its songs, and literature for its passionate excitements--rebelled against the mysteries of faith, even as she chafed against the restraint of discipline, a thing wholly repugnant to her disposition." - Gustave Flaubert
"Wear audacious underwear under the most solemn business attire." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
"Every man is his own hell." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
"The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
"The fear of war is worse than war itself." - Italian Proverbs
"The perfect is the enemy of the good." - Italian Proverbs