This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Etty Hillesum, formally Ester "Etty" Hillesum
I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.
Writing |
In order to be one, you must first be two.
Commitment | Love | Marriage | Relationship | Security | Story | Will | Writing |
Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.
Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.
Experience | Grief | Survival | Writing |
This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.
Aims | Art | Awareness | Experience | Individual | Meaning | Means | Mind | Nothing | Power | Practice | Present | Reflection | Spirit | Work | Art | Awareness |
In my eyes, concepts of theology have only as much value as they are able to interpret experience. It seems to me that we have long reached the point where we theologians only talk to ourselves and debate with our own history of concepts.
Change | Faith | God | Love | People | Poetry | Talking | Teach | Writing | God |
This state, in which nothing definite is thought, planned, striven for, desired or expected, which aims in no particular direction and yet knows itself capable alike of the possible and the impossible, so unswerving is its power - this state, which is at bottom purposeless and egoless, was called by the Masters truly 'spiritual'. It is in fact charged with spiritual awareness and is there also called 'right presence of mind'. This means that the mind or spirit is present anywhere, because it is nowhere attached to any particular place. And it can remain present because, even when related to this or that object, it does not cling to it by reflection and thus lose its original mobility. Like water filling a pond, which is always ready to flow off again, it can work its inexhaustible power because it is free, and be open to everything because it is empty. This state is essentially a primordial state, and its symbol, the empty circle, is not empty of meaning for him who stands within it. Out of the fullness of this presence of mind, disturbed by no ulterior motive, the artist who is released from all attachment must practice his art. But if he is to fit himself self-effacingly into the creative process, the practice of the art must have the way smoothed for it. For if, in his self-immersion, he saw himself faced with a situation into which he could not leap instinctively, he would first have to bring it to consciousness. He would then enter again into all the relationships from which he had detached himself; he would be like one weakened, who considers his program for the day, but not like an Awakened One who lives and works in the primordial state. It would never appear to him as if the individual parts of the creative process were being played into his hands by a higher power; he would never experience how intoxicatingly the vibrancy of an event is communicated to him who is himself only a vibration, and how everything that he does is done before he knows it.
Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.
Better | Heart | Mind | Writing | Instruction |
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
Now look here, Smithers. They's two kind's of stealing. They's the small kind, like what you does, and the big kind, like I does. Fo' de small stealing dey put you in jail soon or late. But fo' de big stealin' dey puts your picture in de paper and yo' statue in de Hall of Fame when you croak. If dey's one thing I learned in ten years on de Pullman cars, listenin' to de white quality talk, it's dat same fact. And when I gits a chance to use it . . . from stowaway to emperor in two years. Dat's goin' some!
But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you — and other people — any trouble.
For all of them told happenings like narrations, chronological and careful, as if the ear of the world listened and wished to know surely.
I have my doubts (that the schools will open on time). We have a law case out of Sojourner-Douglass, and at Chesapeake we have all kinds of issues.
Expectation | God | Illusion | Imagination | Meaning | Means | Will | Work | God | Expectation |
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
But land is land, and it's safer than the stocks and bonds of Wall Street swindlers.
Then the light changed the water, until all about them the woods in the rising wind seemed to grow taller and blow inward together and suddenly turn dark. The rain struck heavily. A huge tail seemed to lash through the air and the river broke in a wound of silver.