This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Dreams of doing good for good-for-nothing people.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
And we talk'd--oh, how we talk'd! her voice so cadenc'd in the talking, made another singing--of the soul! a music without bars-- while the leafy sounds of woodlands, humming round where we were walking, brought interposition worthy--sweet,--as skies about the stars, and she spake such good thoughts natural, as if she always thought them.
As for keeping the attack dogs from nibbling away your courage? My theory, after decades in this business, is that you only give a few people the right to make you feel rotten. You have a handful of chits to give out, penuriously, to those you trust and respect. You don't give them to just anyone with an e-mail address and an epithet.
Battle | Children | Opposition | Parents | Time |
When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brain of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of 'thus saith the Lord.
All the men of the Old Testament were polygamists, and Christ and Paul, the central figures of the New Testament, were celibates, and condemned marriage by both precept and example.
The misnamed "feminine" woman, so admired by her creator, man — the woman who is acquiescent in her inferiority and who has swallowed man's image of her as his ordained helpmate and no more — is in reality the "masculine" woman. The truly feminine woman "cannot help burning with that inner rage that comes from having to identify with her exploiter's negative image of her," and having to conform to her persecutor's idea of femininity and its man-decreed limitations.
Authority | Children | Father | Looks | Mother | Respect | Respect | Child |
The days will rally, wreathing their crazy tarantelle; and you must go on breathing, but I'll be safe in hell. Like January weather, the years will bite and smart, and pull your bones together to wrap your chattering heart. The pretty stuff you're made of will crack and crease and dry. The thing you are afraid of will look from every eye. You will go faltering after the bright, imperious line, and split your throat on laughter, and burn your eyes with brine. You will be frail and musty with peering, furtive head, whilst I am young and lusty among the roaring dead.
Children |
Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.
And then there are always clever people about to promise you that everything will be all right if only you put yourself out a bit... And you get carried away, you suffer so much from the things that exist that you ask for what can't ever exist. Now look at me, I was well away dreaming like a fool and seeing visions of a nice friendly life on good terms with everybody, and off I went, up into the clouds. And when you fall back into the mud it hurts a lot. No! None of it was true, none of those things we thought we could see existed at all. All that was really there was still more misery-- oh yes! as much of that as you like-- and bullets into the bargain!
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
I sought, and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor — the middle one, gray, and half buried in heath — Edgar Linton's only harmonized by the turf and moss, creeping up its foot — Heathcliff's still bare. I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow. All pioneers of truth have been, and still are, reviled; they have been, and still are, persecuted. But did they ask humanity to pay the price? Did they seek to bribe mankind to accept their ideas? They knew too well that he who accepts a truth because of the bribe, will soon barter it away to a higher bidder... Proud and self-reliant characters prefer hatred to such sickening artificial love. Not because of any reward does a free spirit take his stand for a great truth, nor has such a one ever been deterred because of fear of punishment.