This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
The remedy for the Great Depression is to give the workers access to the means of production, and let them produce for themselves, not for others… the American way.
Despise | Good | Meaning | Pious | Question | Sense | Society | Wealth | Will | Society | Old | Understand |
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of accident depend the most important circumstances of his life; to look back and shudder, realizing how close to the edge of nothingness his being has come.
Asceticism | Idealism | Impulse | Mankind | Self-deception | Asceticism |
V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.
It is the beginning of the worst moment. All of the flood barriers are at their maximum level.
Good | Manners | People | Principles | Sense | Understanding | Politeness |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for.
Day | Difficulty | Indifference | Man | Self | Sense | Silence | Sympathy |
The previous regime — armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology — reduced man to a force of production, and nature to a tool of production. In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to the nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy and stinking machine, whose real meaning was not clear to anyone.
V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.
Impulse |
Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little difficulty, to something different each day.
There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
Ability | Absurd | Awareness | Courage | Good | Gratitude | Irony | Life | Life | Meaning | Responsibility | Sense | Vigilance | Awareness |
There are no exact guidelines. There are probably no guidelines at all. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance. Awareness of all the most dangerous kinds of vanity, both in others and in ourselves. A good mind. A modest certainty about the meaning of things. Gratitude for the gift of life and the courage to take responsibility for it. Vigilance of spirit.
Ability | Absurd | Courage | Good | Gratitude | Life | Life | Meaning | Responsibility | Sense | Sensibility |
We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality.
Experience | Order | Responsibility | Sense | Understanding | Will | Work | Understand |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
There is no point of insult that is unforgiving when it was avenged.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
Conscience, the organ of feeling which dominates us and of the opinions which rule us, is presumptuous in the strong, timid in the weak and unfortunate, uneasy in the undecided.