This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
We have been to Rodmell, and as usual I come home depressed – for no reason. Merely moods. Have other people as many as I have? That I shall never now. And sometimes I suppose that even if I came to the end of my incessant search into waht people are and feel I should know nothing still.
The profound word 'number' is at the base of man's thought; it is, to our intelligence, elemental; it signifies harmony as well as mathematics... Without number, no science; without number, no poetry.
The man who can see is a scholar; the man who can walk is a person with experience.
V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
Great artists are always far-seeing. They easily avoid the big stumbling blocks of fact. They rely on their own simplicity and vision. It is fact-fetichism that has given us those scores and scores of American books on America, the works of sociologists, anthropologists, topical problem hunters, working-parties and statisticians, which in the end leave us empty. Henry James succeeds because he rejects information. He was himself the only information he required.
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
The simple definition of globalization is the interweaving of markets, technology, information systems, and telecommunications networks in a way that is shrinking the world from a size medium to a size small. It began decades ago, but accelerated dramatically over the past 10 years, as the price of computing power fell and the world became an ever-more densely interconnected place. People resist this shift — see, for example, the G8 protests of 2001 (one of the bloodiest uprisings in recent European history) or the recent rioting in Pittsburgh at this year’s G20 conference—because they think it primarily benefits big business elites to the detriment of everyone else. But globalization didn’t ruin the world—it just flattened it. And on balance that can benefit everyone, especially the poor. Globalization has pulled millions of people out of poverty in India and China, and multiplied the size of the global middle class. It has raised the global standard of living faster than that at any other time in the history of the world, and it is supporting astounding growth. All world economic activity was valued at $7 trillion in 1950. That’s equal to how much growth took place over just the past decade, even including the recent downturn. Whatever people’s fears of change, globalization is here to stay—and, if properly managed, it will be a good thing.
Ability | Chance | Friend | Good | Important | Lesson | Listening | Meaning | News | People | Question | Respect | Talking | Will | World | Respect |
Media will ask survivors some of the most deplorable questions such as How do you feel right now? Has this changed your life? and Do you think you’ll be able to recover and move on? For most people following these events, the answers are always Like sh*t, Yes, and Hell no.
Initiative | People |
Media Fearmongering stories tend to always cover somewhat unlikely events. Recently I read of an initiative to require car manufacturers to install sensors that alert drivers when they leave a baby in the backseat accidentally. Along those same lines, there is an off switch for the passenger-side airbag in my car, a device that has caused only 30-40 deaths ever. By comparison, more people die every year from drinking too much water. Should Congress legislate safety shutoff valves for faucets? Should they regulate our water to keep us from drinking too much?
Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki
Well, we never expected this! they all say. No one liked her. They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous, and scornful. But when you meet her, she is strangely meek, a completely different person altogether! How embarrassing! Do they really look upon me as a dull thing, I wonder? But I am what I am.
Attention | Beginning | Enlightenment | Good | Heart | Life | Life | Nothing | Order | People | Wishes | World | Old |
Yeah, we should all line up along the Bosphorus Bridge and puff as hard as we can to shove this city in the direction of the West. If that doesn't work, we'll try the other way, see if we can veer to the East. It's no good to be in between. International politics does not appreciate ambiguity.
Impression | People | Theories |
Eleanor Brown, fully Nora Eleanor Louisa Hervey Brown
We came home because we were failures.
All I could say was, I don't know what to do. I remember her taking me by the shoulders and looking me in the eye with a calm smile and saying simply, Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.
Love |
Then my mother shocked me. She said, All those things you want from your relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things, too. In that moment, it was as if my strong mother reached across the table, opened her fist and finally showed me the handful of bullets she'd had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married (and she is happily married, all considerations weighed) to my father... Continuing with this unprecedented string of intimacies, my mother said, You have to understand how little I was raised to expect that I deserved in life, honey. Remember- I come from a different time and place than you do.