This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is not enough for us to prostrate ourselves under the tree which is Creation, and to contemplate its tremendous branches filled with stars. We have a duty to perform, to work upon the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd; to accept, in the inexplicable, only what is necessary; to dispel the superstitions that surround religion --to rid God of His Maggots.
Silence |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. 'I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,' she told me. 'In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.' Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, 'This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.' Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. 'I often talk to this tree,' she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. 'Yes.' What did it say to her? She answered, 'It said to me, I am here--I am here--I am life, eternal life.'
Desolation | Existence | Imagination | Important | Life | Life | Memory | Mind | Past | Poverty | Spirit | World |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.
Imagination | World |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point.
Doubt | Imagination |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
As you can see, arenas, an act is not, as young people often think, like a stone, someone lifts and throws, and it succeeds or fails, that's all. When you lift this rock, the earth becomes lighter and hand to bear it becomes heavier. When you fly, the circuits of the stars respond, and where hit or falls the universe is changed. With each act of compromising the overall balance. The winds and seas, the forces of water, soil and light, animals and plants, and everything they do is good and correct us make. Because all of them act in the balance. Since the hurricane and the blare of the great whales, until the dried drop one sex and the flying gnats: it's all done with a view to balance the total. But we, to the extent that we have dominion over the universe and the one over the other, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do by their nature. We must learn to maintain balance. Once you have intelligence, you should not act out of ignorance. After you have choices, you should not behave irresponsibly.
Children | Imagination |
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 |
V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
Most comic writers like to think they could play it straight if only their public would let them. Waugh is able to be grave without difficulty for he has always been comic for serious reasons. He has his own, almost romantic sense of propriety.
Awe | Imagination | Mind | Society | Society |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.
What business does a dog have in the shop of the blacksmith.
Man | Punishment |
Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
I don't think I'll ever fully get over losing the city council seat. I don't know how that happened. But it
Hypocrisy | People | Reflection | Silence | Poem |
Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
The only possibility of reform in Los Angeles, which is a 'see no, hear no evil' city, is if there is the glaring eye of outside investigators from Sacramento and from Washington D.C.,
Imagination | Thought | Thought |
A child born to a black mother in a state like Mississippi . . . has the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.
Capital punishment | Danger | Defense | Failure | Insanity | Punishment | Danger | Failure |
Tibullus, fully Albius Tibullus NULL
And at the departure he will say, "Mayst thou rest soundly and quietly, and may the light turf lie easy on thy bones."
I will not go so far as to say that the improvement of taste and of virtue is the same, or that they may always be expected to co-exist in an equal degree. More powerful correctives than taste can apply are necessary for reforming the corrupt propensities which too frequently prevail among mankind. Elegant speculations are sometimes found to float on the surface of the mind while bad passions possess the interior regions of the heart. At the same time, this cannot but be admitted, that the exercise of taste is, in its native tendency, moral and purifying.
Character | Imagination | Style |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection–not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose their monkey fur, from the elements. Eventually, they started transposing their hunting fantasies onto cave walls in the form of pictures, first as an attempt at practical magic and later for the strange, unexpected pleasure they discovered in artistic creation. Time passed. Art came off the walls and turned into ritual. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present mindless, voracious trajectory, could land those of us lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again.
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
On the campus of Outlaw College, professors of essential insanities would characterize the conflicting attitudes of Nina Jablonski and Leigh-Cheri as indicative of a general conflict between social idealism and romanticism. As any of the learned professors would explain, plied with sufficient tequila, no matter how fervently a romantic might support a movement, he or she eventually must withdraw from active participation in that movement because the group ethic - the supremacy of the organization over the individual - is an affront to intimacy. Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars with which this life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities.
Capacity | Imagination | Observation | People | Will | World |