This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is no choice more intensely personal, after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.
I have a card stuck on my refrigerator that shows a woman standing in reverence before an open freezer door, saying, 'Amazing! Perfect ice cubes again.' That's the kind of simple rapture I am talking about. I realize we are not put on this earth to stand around open freezers ranting like idiots about ice cubes. But a good quesiton to ask yourself is this: If perfect ice cubes or an evening sky or an old song on the radio has not made your heart flip-flop lately, why not? What is keeping you from feeling the rapture?
Change | Experience | Failure | Order | People | Safe | Failure |
Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.
Better | Depression | Dreams | Important | Integrity | Marriage | Men | Mother | Relationship | Sense | Ugly | Talent |
We are like Tolstoy’s fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, begging for pennies from every passerby, unaware that his fortune was right under him the whole time. Your treasure – your perfection – is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.
Then, I will be a real Italian girl, instead of a total American who still can't hear someone across the street to his friend Marco without wanting instinctively to yell back Polo!
Little | Mother | Order | Time | Understand |
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
The literary artist will... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.
Law |
To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom, as all alike have taught her inferiority and subjection.
Men insist that they don't mind women succeeding so long as they retain their "femininity". Yet the qualities that men consider "feminine" timidity, submissiveness, obedience, silliness, and self-debasement — are the very qualities best guaranteed to assure the defeat of even the most gifted aspirant.
If there's a single message passed down from each generation of American parents to their children, it is a two-word line: Better Yourself. And if there's a temple of self-betterment in each town, it is the local school. We have worshiped there for some time.
Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.
Order | Self-sacrifice | Think |
Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
You may have many a wiser prince sitting in this seat, but you never have had, or shall have, any who loves you better.
Sense |
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
It is in the comprehension of the physically disabled, or disordered ... that we are behind our age.... sympathy as a fine art is backward in the growth of progress ...