Quotes by Playwrights - Page 137

To conquer without risk is to triumph without glory.
Pierre Corneille
No one dreamed them up. No one needed to. The vampire clawing at the window, the werewolf prowling the moor, the hags at the crossroads – they lurked here already. Some nightmares are ancient, as old as civilization. Some are older still.
Robert Dunbar
What can you expect from a stupid government? Anything good? Anything useful, anything clever? Anything just? No! You can expect nothing but stupidity, nothing but mistakes, nothing but injustices and tragedies! All a stupid government can do is to produce wrecks and debris!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The Devil hath powerTo assume a pleasing shape.
William Shakespeare
A person who loves himself can never feel himself completely lonely!
Mehmet Murat ildan
My gods dwell in temples made with hands.
Oscar Wilde
One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.
Oscar Wilde
Mid-Term BreakI sat all morning in the college sick bayCounting bells knelling classes to a close.At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.In the porch I met my father crying—He had always taken funerals in his stride—And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pramWhen I came in, and I was embarrassedBy old men standing up to shake my handAnd tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,Away at school, as my mother held my handIn hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.At ten o'clock the ambulance arrivedWith the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.Next morning I went up into the room. SnowdropsAnd candles soothed the bedside; I saw himFor the first time in six weeks. Paler now,Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.A four-foot box, a foot for every year.
Seamus Heaney
At first it's pretty cool: the limitless fruit of knowledge hanging low in your path. Then you realize it's the only thing to eat around here.
Rajiv Joseph
Family ... the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.
August Strindberg
It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.
Samuel Beckett
We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.
Jules Verne
Frailty thy name is woman!
William Shakespeare
The plays should have the half-life of plutonium.
Suzan-Lori Parks
I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.
Oscar Wilde
Looking at it, I started crying. Maybe it was knowing that I had to give up the fantasy, the enormous life consuming fantasy , that someone or something was going to do this for me – the fantasy that someone was coming to lead my life, to choose direction, to give me orgasms.
Eve Ensler
It isn't important to come out on top what matters is to be the one who comes out alive.
Bertolt Brecht
My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition--that's all. I was in a position to help this young man my wife loved. He soon showed his ambition then. There are different types of ambition - that is all, and my wife found she preferred mine. Because it was limitless. They do not feel the infinite is an unworthy rival, but for a man to prefer the desk of an assistant manager - that is an insult.
Graham Greene
From whichever direction or from whoever the light comes to you, always welcome it!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fairTo be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.
William Shakespeare
Positive Thinking Is Practical There is in the worst of fortune the best of chances for a happy change.
Euripides
See how she leans her cheek upon her hand. O, that I were a glove upon that hand That I might touch that cheek!
William Shakespeare
Much less than a man, a little bit more than a jackal! This is the person without compassion!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.
Ingmar Bergman
Now I am steel-set: I follow the call to the clear radiance and glow of the heights.
Henrik Ibsen
Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.
Joseph Addison
In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
George Bernard Shaw
When alone, concentrate on the fruits of the solitude, not on the poisons of it!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.
W Somerset Maugham
He is as full of valor as of kindness. Princely in both.
William Shakespeare
This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.
William Saroyan
Old-fashioned people think you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have, the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car.
George Bernard Shaw
Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.
T.S Eliot
HAMM:Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?NAGG:I didn't know.HAMM:What? What didn't you know?NAGG:That it'd be you.(Pause.)
Samuel Beckett
Anyone who is considered funny will tell you, sometimes without even your asking, that deep inside they are very serious, neurotic, introspective people.
Wendy Wasserstein
The train resembles the Soviet type and is quite comfortable, but all socialist structures I have ever encountered have toilets stemming from a single model engineered by the Orthodox Church in Tsarist Russia to ensure that man never be allowed to forget the corruption of the flesh.
Arthur Miller
Don’t get stuck in one candle; find other candles, create other candles!
Mehmet Murat ildan
In your most desperate moments where you crawl on the ground like worms, sometimes you suddenly hear the voice of a savior, the voice of the Music which immediately carries you away to the stars!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.
Yukio Mishima
Screw your courage to the sticking-place
William Shakespeare
For the land, the sea is beautiful; for the sea, the land is beautiful!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What sort of adventures?' I asked him, astonished. ‘All sorts, Monsieur. Getting on the wrong train. Stopping in an unknown city. Losing your briefcase, being arrested by mistake, spending the night in prison. Monsieur, I believe the word adventure could be defined: an event out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary.
Jean-Paul Sartre
For long the two enemies looked at one another, Hook shuddering slightly, and Peter with the strange smile upon his face."So, Pan," said Hook at last, "this is all your doing.""Ay, James Hook," came the stern answer, "it is all my doing.""Proud and insolent youth," said Hook, "prepare to meet thy doom.""Dark and sinister man,“For long the two enemies looked at one another, Hook shuddering slightly, and Peter with the strange smile upon his face."Dark and sinister man," Peter answered, "have at thee.
J.M. Barrie
I know there is no straight road No straight road in this world Only a giant labyrinth Of intersecting crossroads
Federico García Lorca
For a weak person, every little hill is a giant mountain; for a strong person, every giant mountain is a little hill!
Mehmet Murat ildan
So you see, we are not free to choose our fate. There is a yoke to be borne and freedom is only an illusion. I am not free. God has put me here on earth for a reason.
Naomi Ragen
So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!
Jean-Paul Sartre
Never assume that the person you are dealing with is weaker or less important than you are. Some people are slow to take offense, which may make you misjudge the thickness of their skin, and fail to worry about insulting them. But should you offend their honor and their pride, they will overwhelm you with a violence that seems sudden and extreme given their slowness to anger. If you want to turn people down, it is best to do so politely and respectfully, even if you feel their request is impudent or their offer ridiculous.
Robert Greene
PRESIDENT BARTLETT: "See how benevolent I can be when everybody just does what I tell them.
Aaron Sorkin
The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honour or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The expedition of my violent love outrun the pauser, reason.
William Shakespeare
It is good to say something beautiful; it is even better to say something right; but saying a right thing beautifully, that is the best!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.'Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.
Graham Greene
To live is to paint, it is to create; but while we are painting, we are being painted, being created as well!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and, by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.
William Shakespeare
No longer mourn for me when I am deadthan you shall hear the surly sullen bell give warning to the world that I am fled from this vile world with vilest worms to dwell: nay, if you read this line, remember not the hand that writ it, for I love you so, that I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,if thinking on me then should make you woe. O! if, I say, you look upon this verse when I perhaps compounded am with clay, do not so much as my poor name rehearse; but let your love even with my life decay; lest the wise world should look into your moan, and mock you with me after I am gone.
William Shakespeare
But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert - if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people's anger. "Swine!" He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself.
Jean-Paul Sartre
On Earth you can meet Heaven and this meeting actualises every time you meet a kind person!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Everybody, he mused had everything worked out. Except me
Earl Lovelace
There is no such thing as romance in our day women have become too brilliant nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman.
Oscar Wilde