This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It’s the least you can do, really, as a polite guest.
Sorrow breaks seasons and reposing hours, Makes the night morning and the noontide night: Princes have but their titles for their glories, An outward honor for an inward toil; And for unfelt imaginations They often feel a world of restless cares; So that between their titles and low name There's nothing differs but the outward fame. Richard III, Act i, Scene 4
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Life, struck sharp on death, makes awful lightning. His last word was, 'Love–' 'Love, my child, love, love!'–(then he had done with grief) 'Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone, and none was left to love in all the world.
We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, drastic change of character that we have to renounce our individuality. To know God, you only need to renounce one thing - your sense of division from God
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
My letters! all dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering against my tremulous hands which loose the string and let them drop down on my knee to-night. This said, -- he wished to have me in his sight once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring to come and touch my hand ... a simple thing, Yet I wept for it! -- this... the paper's light... said, Dear I love thee; and I sank and quailed as if God's future thundered on my past. This said, I am thine -- and so its ink has paled with lying at my heart that beat too fast. And this ... O Love, thy words have ill availed if, what this said, I dared repeat at last!
We were talking the other evening about the phrases one uses when trying to comfort someone who is in distress. I told him that in English we sometimes say, 'I've been there.' This was unclear to him at first-I've been where? But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific loacation, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.
That you should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong instead.
Heart |
Where am I getting the brain space to store these words? I'm hoping that maybe my mind has decided to clear out some old negative thoughts and sad memories and replace them with these shiny new words.
When the dust has settled years later, we might ask ourselves, What was I thinking? and the answer is usually: You weren’t. Psychologists call that state of deluded madness narcissistic love. I call it my twenties.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The critics say that epics have died out with Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods; I'll not believe it. I could never deem as Payne Knight did, that Homer's heroes measured twelve feet high. They were but men: -his Helen's hair turned grey like any plain Miss Smith's who wears a front; And Hector's infant whimpered at a plume as yours last Friday at a turkey-cock. All heroes are essential men, and all men possible heroes: every age, heroic in proportions, double faced, looks backward and before, expects a morn and claims an epos.