This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
No, freedom has a thousand charms to show that slaves, howe'er contented, never know.
Light |
His head, not yet by time completely silver'd o'er, bespoke him past the bounds of freakish youth, but strong for service still, and unimpair'd.
Awe |
The tear that is wiped with a little address may be followed, perhaps, by a smile.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past.
Intelligence | World | Talent |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbor’s household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day . . .
Experience | Fallacy | Giving | Happy | Little | Looks | Memory | Method | Mind | Story | Sympathy | Truth | Work |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.
Cost | Excitement | Present | Words |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
For while Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes, and sometimes flatter them to their faces, in private they treat them with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization.
Whitney Young, fully Whitney Moore Young, Jr.
I'd rather be prepared for an opportunity that never comes than have an opportunity come and I am not prepared.
For a decade, the politics of the European dictators was unrivalled. In order to comprehend the essence of politics, one only has to remember that it was a Hitler who, for many years, was able to keep the world breathless. Hitler as a political genius was a magnificent unmasking of the essence of politics in general. With Hitler, politics reached the peak of its development. We know what were its fruits and what was the reaction of the world. In brief, I believe that the twentieth century, with its gigantic catastrophes, ushers in a new social era, an era free of politics. It remains to be seen what part politics will play in the eradication of the political emotional plague and what part the consciously organized functions of love, work and knowledge.
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
The Hiss Case has turned my wife and me into old people - not a disagreeable condition. But we who used to plan in terms of decades, now find a year, two years, the utmost span of time we can take in.
Defiance | Distinguish | Good | Laughter | Mind | Power | Reality | Smile | Understanding | Will | World | Crisis |
With this the [genuine] leader will cause many to turn against him. He will have robbed these many of an object to hold on to, like a bean stalk would feel robbed of comfort if you took away the supporting stick of wood.
Capacity | Criticism | Education | Enough | Future | Humanity | Ideas | Life | Life | Play | Sense | Sound | Thinking | Work | Think |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation.
People |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Our leading men are not of much account and never have been, but the average of the people is immense, beyond all history. Sometimes I think in all departments, literature and art included, that will be the way our superiority will exhibit itself. We will not have great individuals or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly great.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero.
Spirit |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am, Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me, I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you. Writing and talk do not prove me, I carry the plenum of proof in my face,
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
O the joy of my spirit--it is uncaged--it darts like lightning! It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time, I will have thousands of globes and all time.
Joy | Personality |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Are you the new person drawn toward me? To begin with, take warning - I am surely far different from what you suppose; do you suppose you will find in me your ideal? Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover? Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction? Do you think I am trusty and faithful? Do you see no further than this façade—this smooth and tolerant manner of me? Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?