This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
Perhaps you think you see a certain contradiction here? In that case, a word in your ear. Study your wife closely, for the next four-and-twenty hours. If your good lady doesn't exhibit something in the shape of a contradiction in that time, Heaven help you!--you have married a monster.
As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture.
Intelligence | Land | Story | Time | Tradition |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
I just make what I like - warm and human stories, ones about historic characters and events, and about animals. If there is a secret, I guess it's that I never make the pictures too childish, but always try to get in a little satire of adult foibles.
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
Fantasy and reality often overlap.
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
We're not trying to entertain the critics ... I'll take my chances with the public.
Contentment | Good | Happy | Public | Worry | Happiness | Think |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Maybe it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who knows?), maybe it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning—so now finally, good-bye—and hail! my Fancy.
Walt Kelley, fully Walter Crawford "Walt" Kelly, Jr.
[After Pogo says, Eventual Porky, I figger ev'ry critter's heart's in the right place., Porky responds:] If you gotta be wrong 'bout somthin', that's 'bout the best thing they is to be wrong 'bout.
All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action; all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that delays are dangerous, and that the sluggish man — the man who roasteth not that which he took in hunting — will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it. And in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Writing and print and the computer are all ways of technologizing the word. Once the word is technologized, there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available. Moreover, the new technology is not merely used to convey the critique: in fact, it brought the critique into existence.
The natural effect of sorrow over the dead is to refine and elevate the mind.
Church | Present | Speculation | Following |
How to be a Poet (to remind myself) - Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill-more of each than you have-inspiration work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity… Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are so unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.
Little | Story | Tenderness |
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
To the question: Do married people live longer?--Fields responded: No, it just seems longer.
Need |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.