This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I distinguish three sorts of signs: 1. Accidental signs, or the objects which particular circumstances have connected with some of our ideas, so as to render the one proper to revive the other. 2. Natural signs, or the cries which nature has established to express the passions of joy, of fear, or of grief, 3. Instituted signs, or those which we have chosen ourselves, and bear only an arbitrary relation to our ideas.
Distinction | Distinguish | Experience | Impression | Play | Rest |
These two arts associated themselves with that of gesture, their elder sister, and known by the name of Dance. From whence there is reason to conjecture, that some kind of dance, and some kind of music and poetry, might have been observed at all times, and in all nations.
If a pastor is not in touch with joy, it will be difficult to preach or teach convincingly that the news is good.
Excellence | Excellence |
Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.
Enough | Imagination | Little | People | Praise | Wonder | Blessed |
When my mother would tell me that she wanted me to have something because she as a child had never had it, I wanted, or I partly wanted, to give it back. All my life I continued to feel that bliss for me would have to imply my mother's deprivation or sacrifice. I don't think it would have occurred to her what a double emotion I felt, and indeed I know that it was being unfair to her, for what she said was simply the truth.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.
Heart |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
Plan |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).
Darkness | Death | Defeat | Earth | Failure | Hope | Life | Life | Light | Love | Mystery | Nothing | Power | Reading | Sadness | Will | Failure |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.
Memory |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing.
Men | Model | Time | Wonder | Understand |
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
They are distorted, deformed, hideous mentally and morally. Their trade is treason, their breath is pollution and yet the officials of the C.B.&Q. formed a conspiracy with these professional liars, perjurers, cut-throats and murderers to overcome a strike, the result of a policy of flagrant injustice.
Duty | Government | Talking | Time | War | Government |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the higher altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for the freedom not only to conform but to consume.