This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
Almost everyone smokes as if their pulmonary well-being depended on it — the multinational mélange of gooks; the dishwashers, who are all Czechs here; the servers, who are American natives — creating an atmosphere in which oxygen is only an occasional pollutant. My first morning at Jerry's, when the hypoglycemic shakes set in, I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don't understand how she can go so long without food. 'Well, I don't understand how you can go so long without a cigarette,' she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for other; smoking is what you do for yourself. I don't know why the anti-smoking crusaders have never grasped the element of defiant self-nurturance that makes the habit so endearing to its victims — as if, in the American workplace, the only thing people have to call their own is the tumors they are nourishing and the spare moments they devote to feeding them.
Habit | People | Work | Understand |
Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt
The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It's not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it's the resentment that settles on your face.
Nothing | Resentment |
Tacitus, fully Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus NULL
As for myself, may the sweet Muses, as Virgil says, bear me away to their holy places where sacred streams do flow, beyond the reach of anxiety and care, and free from the obligation of performing each day some task that goes against the grain. May I no longer have anything to do with the mad racket and the hazards of the forum, or tremble as I try a fall with white-faced Fame. I do not want to be roused from sleep by the clatter of morning callers or by some breathless messenger from the palace; I do not care, in drawing my will, to give a money-pledge for its safe execution through anxiety as to what is to happen afterwards; I wish for no larger estate than I can leave to the heir of my own free choice. Some day or other the last hour will strike also for me, and my prayer is that my effigy may be set up beside my grave, not grim and scowling, but all smiles and garlands, and that no one shall seek to honor my memory either by a motion in the senate or by a petition to the Emperor.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Day | Honor | Memory | Obligation | Prayer | Sacred | Safe | Will |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything.
To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy... is to set our own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.
Circumstances | Events |
Ralph Ellison, fully Ralph Waldo Ellison
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
Love |
Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a gray suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always somebody else's money he's adding up.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like old faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.
Old |
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
Leave off losings, and take on winnings, Erase all mortal ends, give birth to only new beginnings, In a billion years of morning and a billion years of sleep.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
Love |
Every morning I wake up, give thanks to God, because you have something to do, whether you like the job it would not. Forced to work and the work will best preserve your modesty, self-control ability, diligence, persistence, satisfaction, and a hundred other virtues which are not known by people who are careless.
People | Self-control | Will | Work |
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
Or it is morning on the hills, when Hope is as wide as the world; or it is the evening on the shore
Hope |
Richard L. Evans, fully Richard Louis Evans
Realize that the privilege to work is a gift. Love of work is success. Be thankful that every morning that you get up that you have something that must be done (whether you like it or not).
The morning was glorious, one of those crystalline, dry, blue, fall days when the temperature hovers right at anticipation.
Right |
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
Old |
Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley
As the storm came nearer I began to realize that I hadn't made the most of my three years' immunity. In fact, I hadn't done a single thing about cleaning up my life. I was, if anything, an even more logical target for lightning than the last time I was in range. And thunderstorms don't creep up on you at seven o'clock in the morning in a non-thunderstorm country for nothing, you know. I lined up a rather panicky schedule of reforms.
Time |
The Road Not Taken - Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
He thought he kept the universe alone; For all the voice in answer he could wake Was but the mocking echo of his own From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake. Some morning from the boulder-broken beach He would cry out on life, that what it wants Is not its own love back in copy speech, But counter-love, original response. And nothing ever came of what he cried Unless it was the embodiment that crashed In the cliff's talus on the other side, And then in the far-distant water splashed, But after a time allowed for it to swim, Instead of proving human when it neared And someone else additional to him, As a great buck it powerfully appeared, Pushing the crumpled water up ahead, And landed pouring like a waterfall, And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, And forced the underbrush--and that was all.