This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
God did not become a servant so that we could order him around.
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]
Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.
Theology is about God, and God is Spirit … we have accumulated a lot of experience in the Christian community of persons treating theology as a subject in which God is studied in the ways we are taught to study in our schools—acquiring information that we can use, or satisfying our curiosity, or obtaining qualifications for a job or profession. There are, in fact, a lot of people within and outside formal religious settings who talk and write a lot about spirituality, things of the spirit or the soul or higher things, but are not interested in God. There is a wonderful line in T. H. White’s novel of King Arthur (The Once and Future King), in which Guinevere in her old age becomes the abbess of a convent: ‘she was a wonderful theologian but she wasn’t interested in God.’ It happens.
Children | God | Liberty | People | Rhetoric | Service | Wisdom | Work | Instruction | God |
The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.
Children | Experience | Wisdom | Old |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can't always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
You need at this time especially to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder. You need to know that you were not created to work and produce and impoverish yourself to enrich an idle exploiter. You need to know that you have a mind to improve, a soul to develop, and a manhood to sustain.
Children | Duty | Obligation | Think |
A sweet thing, for whatever time, to revisit in dreams the dear dad we have lost.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly, said Mr Levy, School is pretty bad... (Part One, Chapter One)
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.
Events |