This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
O powerful love, that in some respects makes a beast a man, in some other, a man a beast.
Sound |
Ornament is but the gilded shore to a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf veiling an Indian; beauty, in a word, the seeming truth which cunning times put on to entrap the wisest.
Time |
On, on, you noble English, whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof, fathers that like so many Alexanders have in these parts from morn till even fought and sheathed their swords for lack of argument dishonor not your mothers; now attest that those whom you called fathers did beget you!
To know means to record in one's memory; but to understand means to blend with the thing and to assimilate it oneself.
Whoever lets himself be led by the heart will never lose his way.
Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps. Much Ado About Nothing (Hero at III, i)
But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If they love you, you can have all. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, the money of the dog during the dog - anything. If they love will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every sense of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will mentally endowed with all good qualities that you never really developed in yourself and I will buy Christmas gifts for the whole family. I'll give you the sun and the rain, and if not available, I'll keep my tickets later. I'll give you all this and more, until you feel so exhausted and depleted that the only way to restore your energy will be carried away by someone else. did not report these facts for themselves with pride, but it has always been.
There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And who's in charge? Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.
This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. This, in part, is how we become annexes of each other, trellises on which each other's biography can grow.
Advertising | Enjoyment | Insecurity | Need | People | Worth |
I have a card stuck on my refrigerator that shows a woman standing in reverence before an open freezer door, saying, 'Amazing! Perfect ice cubes again.' That's the kind of simple rapture I am talking about. I realize we are not put on this earth to stand around open freezers ranting like idiots about ice cubes. But a good quesiton to ask yourself is this: If perfect ice cubes or an evening sky or an old song on the radio has not made your heart flip-flop lately, why not? What is keeping you from feeling the rapture?
Change | Experience | Failure | Order | People | Safe | Failure |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.
Smile |
Embrace truth as it is revealed to-day by human reason.
In the biotech revolution, it is the human body, not iron or steel or plastic, that's at the source. Are the biocapitalists going to be allowed to dig without consent into our genetic codes, then market them?
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
When weary with the long day’s care, and earthly change from pain to pain, and lost, and ready to despair, thy kind voice calls me back again O my true friend, I am not lone while thou canst speak with such a tone! So hopeless is the world without, the world within I doubly prize; thy world where guile and hate and doubt and cold suspicion never rise; where thou and I and Liberty have undisputed sovereignty. What matters it that all around danger and grief and darkness lie, if but within our bosom’s bound we hold a bright unsullied sky, warm with ten thousand mingled rays of suns that know no winter days? Reason indeed may oft complain for Nature’s sad reality, and tell the suffering heart how vain its cherished dreams must always be; and Truth may rudely trample down the flowers of Fancy newly blown. But thou art ever there to bring the hovering visions back and breathe new glories o’er the blighted spring and call a lovelier life from death, and whisper with a voice divine of real worlds as bright as thine. I trust not to thy phantom bliss, yet still in evening’s quiet hour with never-failing thankfulness I welcome thee, benignant power, sure solacer of human cares and brighter hope when hope despairs.
Struggle |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, but which will bloom most constantly?
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
Better | Care | Day | Dispute | Excitement | Knowing | World |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I had gone... to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know.
Better | Care | Day | Dispute | Excitement | Good | Knowing | Lord | World |