This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Funest philosophers and ponderers, their evocations are the speech of clouds.
Poem |
That scrawny cry—it was a chorister whose C preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, surrounded by its choral rings, still far away. It was like a new knowledge of reality.
The great ship, Balayne, lay frozen in the sea. The one-foot stars were couriers of its death to the wild limits of its habitation. These were not tepid stars of torpid places but bravest at midnight and in lonely spaces, they looked back at Hans' look with savage faces.
The reason can give nothing at all like the response to desire.
It needed the heavy nights of drenching weather to make him return to people, to find among them whatever it was that he found in their absence, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation.
The poem is the cry of its occasion, part of the res itself and not about it.
Poem |
The poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice. It has not always had to find: the scene was set; it repeated what was in the script. Then the theatre was changed to something else. Its past was a souvenir.
Intelligence | Poem |
The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain - There it was, word for word, the poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed a place to go to in his own direction. How he had recomposed the pines, shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds for the outlook that would be right, where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: the exact rock where his inexactness would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged where he could lie and gazing down at the sea, recognize his unique and solitary home.
The poem refreshes life so that we share, for a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies belief in an immaculate beginning and sends us, winged by an unconscious will, to an immaculate end. We move between these points: from that ever-early candor to its late plural.
The poem, through candor, brings back a power again that gives a candid kind to everything.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most pernicious inclinations, is there anything more foolish for wanting to continuously bring a burden that we would always throw down? To have a horror of their lives and hold on to their existence? In short, to caress the serpent that devours us, until we have eaten my heart?
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?
Comedy | Experience | Life | Life | Means | Poetry | Tragedy | Poem |
It seems unspeakably important that all persons among us, and especially the student and the writer, should be pervaded with Americanism. Americanism includes the faith that national self-government is not a chimera, but that, with whatever inconsistencies and drawbacks, we are steadily establishing it here. It includes the faith that to this good thing all other good things must in time be added. When a man is heartily imbued with such a national sentiment as this, it is as marrow in his bones and blood in his veins. He may still need culture, but he has the basis of all culture. He is entitled to an imperturbable patience and hopefulness, born of a living faith. All that is scanty in our intellectual attainments, or poor in our artistic life, may then be cheerfully endured: if a man sees his house steadily rising on sure foundations, he can wait or let his children wait for the cornice and the frieze. But if one happens to be born or bred in America without this wholesome confidence, there is no happiness for him; he has his alternative between being unhappy at home and unhappy abroad; it is a choice of martyrdoms for himself, and a certainty of martyrdom for his friends.
Affectation | Change | Choice | Enough | Literature | Little | Memory | Spirit | Wonder | Work | Poem |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
You know how impossible it is, in short, to have a free nation if it is a military nation and under military orders
Admiration | Association | Gratitude | Heart | Joy | Love | Pride | Thought | Association | Poem | Thought |
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 |