This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key
A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but of free and secret love; and in this respect, too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life. To anyone tender of conscience, the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones.
Life | Life | Little | Passion | Pity | Time | Tragedy | Youth | Youth |
Sometimes it seems to me that I am capable of absolutely nothing, but that nature through me can accomplish a great deal.
Passion |
Symptom Recital: I do not like my state of mind; I'm bitter, querulous, unkind. I hate my legs, I hate my hands, I do not yearn for lovelier lands. I dread the dawn's recurrent light; I hate to go to bed at night. I snoot at simple, earnest folk. I cannot take the gentlest joke. I find no peace in paint or type. My world is but a lot of tripe. I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted. For what I think, I'd be arrested. I am not sick, I am not well. My quondam dreams are shot to hell. My soul is crushed, my spirit sore; I do not like me any more. I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse. I ponder on the narrow house. I shudder at the thought of men... I'm due to fall in love again.
Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.
Passion |
She wanted to live, and live fully, and to give life, she who loved life! What was the good of existing, if you couldn't give yourself?
Patience |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
She bounded before me, and returned to my side, and was off again like a young greyhound; and, at first, I found plenty of entertainment in listening to the larks singing far and near; and enjoying the sweet, warm sunshine; and watching her, my pet, and my delight, with her golden ringlets flying loose behind, and her bright cheek, as soft and pure in its bloom, as a wild rose, and her eyes radiant with cloudless pleasure. She was a happy creature, and an angel in those days. It is a pity she could not stay content.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
I pray every night that I may live after him; because I would rather be miserable than that he should be — that proves I love him better than myself.
Passion | Superstition |
In modern capitalism economic exploitation rather than political oppression is the real enemy of the people.
Ideas | Passion | Qualities | Revolution |
My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own story books, before I could read them for myself I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the head of fairy tales. In Once upon a time, an o had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers. When the day came years later for me to see the Book of Kells, all the wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept over me a thousand times, and the illumination, the gold, seemed a part of the world's beauty and holiness that had been there from the start.
Indifference | Passion |
If , then, we desire a simple test of the quality of our spiritual life, a consideration of the tranquility, gentleness and strength with which we deal with the circumstances of our outward life will serve us better than anything that is based on the loftiness of our religious notions, or fervor of our religious feelings.
My Word, said Bouvard, look at those worlds disappearing. Pecuchet replied: If our world in its turn danced about, the citizens of the stars would be no more impressed than we are now. Ideas like that are rather humbling. What is the point of it all? Perhaps there isn?t a point. Beautiful things spoil nothing. Speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.
Excellence | Passion | Will | Excellence |