This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"If by spiritual direction you mean entering into a friendship with another person in which an awareness and responsiveness to God's Spirit in the everydayness of your life is cultivated, fine. Then why call in an awkward term like spiritual direction? Why not just friend?" - Eugene Peterson
"On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"Never had life seemed so good. A little while and she would come, delicious, trembling, glancing behind her to see who might be looking, with her flowered dress, her gold lorgnon, her dainty shoes, and all the manifold refinements so new to his experience, the ineffable charm of virtue on the brink of surrender. The fane encompassed her about like some stately bower, the vaulted roof leaned down to catch, amid the shadows, the whispered avowal of her love, the painted windows shone with glory to shed a light upon her countenance, and the censers would burn that she might float like an angel amid the perfumed cloud." - Gustave Flaubert
"I have heard it asserted that the inadequate sanctions already applied have not achieved their object. At no time and under no circumstances could sanctions that were intentionally inadequate, intentionally badly applied, stop an aggressor. This is not a case of the impossibility of stopping an aggressor but of the refusal to stop an aggressor." - Haile Selassie
"But the Queen Arwen said: 'A gift I will give you. For I am the daughter of Elrond. I shall not go with him now when he departs to the Havens; for mine is the choice of Luthien, and as she so I have chosen, both the sweet and the bitter. But in my stead you shall go, Ring-bearer, when the time comes, and if you then desire it. If your hurts grieve you still and the memory or your burden is heavy, then you may pass into the West, until all your wounds and weariness are healed. But wear this now in memory of Elfstone and Evenstar with whom your life has been woven!' And she took a white gem like a star that lay upon her breast hanging upon a silver chain, and she set the chain around Frodo's neck. 'When the memory of the fear and the darkness troubles you,' she said, 'this will bring you aid." -