This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A woman's courage rises with the greatness of the emergency." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"Are there, infinitely varying with each individual, inbred forces of Good and Evil in all of us, deep down below the reach of mortal encouragement and mortal repression -- hidden Good and hidden Evil, both alike at the mercy of the liberating opportunity and the sufficient temptation?" - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"Is it necessary to say what my first impression was when I looked at my visitor's card? Surely not! My sister having married a foreigner, there was but one impression that any man in his senses could possibly feel. Of course the Count had come to borrow money of me. Louis, I said, do you think he would go away if you gave him five shillings?" - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"Not the shadow of a doubt crossed my mind of the purpose for which the Count had left the theatre. His escape from us, that evening, was beyond all question the preliminary only to his escape from London. The mark of the Brotherhood was on his arm-I felt as certain of it as if he had shown me the brand; and the betrayal of the Brotherhood was on his conscience-I had seen it in his recognition of Pesca." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realize. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"The worst curse of human life is the detestable necessity of taking exercise." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"True remorse depends, to my mind, on a man's accurate knowledge of his own motives." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"When Gott made the womens, he was sorry afterwards for the poor mens--and he made tobaccos to comfort them." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"When two members of a family or two intimate friends are separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return of the relative or friend who has been travelling always seems to place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a painful disadvantage when the two first meet. The sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved in the other, seems at first to part the sympathies of the most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by both, between them on either side." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"Every time somebody has thought of relief for the farmer it has been to make it so he could borrow more money. What he needs is some way to pay back. Not some way to borrow more." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!" - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"Say, did you read what this writer just dug up in George Washington's diary? I was so ashamed I sat up all night reading it." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"The time to save is now. When a dog gets a bone, he doesn't go out and make a down payment on a bigger bone. He buries the one he's got." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade - that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer... She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true... She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture... All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Excerpt taken from On the Art of Fiction by circa 1920." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Many a night that summer she left Dr. Archie's office with a desire to run and run about those quiet streets until she wore out her shoes, or wore out the streets themselves; when her chest ached and it seemed as if her heart were spreading all over the desert. When she went home, it was not to go to sleep. She used to drag her mattress beside her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window -- or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation. It was on such nights that Thea Kronborg learned the thing that old Dumas meant when he told the Romanticists that to make a drama he needed but one passion and four walls." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"My dear, he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, it's been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms." - Wendell Phillips
"External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom.… Hence every sincere break with Communism is a religious experience." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"Yet there is one experience which most sincere ex-Communists share, whether or not they go only part way to the end of the question it poses. The daughter of a former German diplomat in Moscow was trying to explain to me why her father, who, as an enlightened modern man, had been extremely pro-Communist, had become an implacable anti-Communist. It was hard for her because, as an enlightened modern girl, she shared the Communist vision without being a Communist. But she loved her father and the irrationality of his defection embarrassed her. 'He was immensely pro-Soviet,' she said,' and then -- you will laugh at me -- but you must not laugh at my father -- and then -- one night -- in Moscow -- he heard screams. That's all. Simply one night he heard screams.' A child of Reason and the 20th century, she knew that there is a logic of the mind. She did not know that the soul has a logic that may be more compelling than the mind's. She did not know at all that she had swept away the logic of the mind, the logic of history, the logic of politics, the myth of the 20th century, with five annihilating words: one night he heard screams." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"You beg for happiness in life, but security is more important to you, even if it costs you your spine or your life. Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; love more than money; your freedom more than party line or public opinion; when your thinking will be in harmony with your feelings; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians; when you will have more respect for the love between man and woman than for a marriage license." - Wilhelm Reich
"You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it." - Wilhelm Reich
"Give the public everything you can give them, keep the place as clean as you can keep it, keep it friendly." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"I love the nostalgic myself. I hope we never lose some of the things of the past." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"A shock electric—the night sustain'd it; till with ominous hum, our hive at day-break, pour'd out its myriads." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibility of their own souls." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, and whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman