Quotes by Playwrights - Page 165

In the yard of the inn, Daffy Cadwaladyr introduced himself. "Short for Davyd," he said pleasantly.The Londoner looked as if she'd never heard a sillier name in her life.
Emma Donoghue
But I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like moulten lead.
William Shakespeare
A night without stars is a night wasted.
Mehmet Murat ildan
Why, we are just the same - I am only a little girl like you. It's just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!
Frances Hodgson Burnett
I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.
Tennessee Williams
There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers. As {she} sat at the edge of {the lake}, memory blossoms floated unbounded, as though breathed, no words spoken. Like birds that fly across national borders, between countries at war at each other.
Rebecca Wells
If there were a sympathy in choice,War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it,Making it momentary as a sound,Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,Brief as the lightning in the collied nightThat, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'The jaws of darkness do devour it up;So quick bright things come to confusion.
William Shakespeare
I beg for justice, which you, Prince, must give. Romeo killed Tybalt; Romeo must not live.
William Shakespeare
Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingos flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents...
J.M. Barrie
Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.
Oscar Wilde
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
Oscar Wilde
I believe that poems die the moment they are outwardly expressed.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.
Joseph Heller
What's done can't be undone.
William Shakespeare
You can't be neutral on a moving train.
Howard Zinn
I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan't make the mistakes I've made. When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I'm going to bring up my daughter so that she's free and can stand on her own feet. I´m not going to bring a child into the world, and love her, and bring her up, just so that some man may want to sleep with her so much that he's willing to provide her with board and lodging for the rest of her life.
W Somerset Maugham
Harold believed his journey was truly beginning. He had thought it started the moment he decided to walk to Berwick, but he saw now that he had been naïve. Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways. You could think you were starting something afresh, when actually what you were doing was carrying on as before. He had faced his shortcomings and overcame them, and so the real business of walking was happening only now.
Rachel Joyce
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
George Bernard Shaw
Everyone has the best of feelings towards mankind in general, but not towards the individual man. We'll kill men, but we want to save mankind. And that isn't right, your Reverence. The world will be an evil place as long as people don't believe in other people.
Karel Čapek
I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
George Bernard Shaw
The more freedom you get, the less your mind and your body is strangled!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Failure knocks the door of the unprepared minds very often.
Mehmet Murat ildan
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features, Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly. Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,Could never be friendly ourselves.
Bertolt Brecht
It is time to reverse this prejudice against conscious effort and to see the powers we gain through practice and discipline as eminently inspiring and even miraculous.
Robert Greene
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Oscar Wilde
Nobody adores fertilizer. Nobody devotes their life to fertilizer (unless they own a fertilizer company). But, shit, you need it to grow the crops. The land is arid and dry without it, and trying to grow things is likely to be futile.
Shellen Lubin
It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
Noël Coward
The Devil's out of fashion.
Dodie Smith
Thousands of channels there are through which the beauty of your soul may sail even unto our thoughts. Above all is there the wonderful, central channel of love.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Ambition having reached the summit longs to descend.
Pierre Corneille
That was why Peg loved the Messiah best of all. Because it showed people they were not alone. No matter about their differences, the music lifted them up and lowered them down, only to raise them even higher. It worked like a spell.
Rachel Joyce
When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
Tom Stoppard
Natural disasters happen from time to time but poverty happens all the time and therefore poverty is the greatest tragedy, it is the greatest disaster of mankind!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Patsy had asked him if he had had adventures in Paris and he had truthfully answered no. It was a fact that he had done nothing; his father thought he had had a devil of a time and was afraid he had contracted a venereal disease, and he hadn't even had a woman; only one thing had happened to him, it was rather curious when you came to think of it, and he didn't just then quite know what to do about it: the bottom had fallen out of his world.
W Somerset Maugham
OEDIPUS:O, O, O, they will all come,all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let melook upon you no more after today!I who first saw the light bred of a matchaccursed, and accursed in my livingwith them I lived with, cursed in my killing.
Sophocles
Salomé, Salomé, dance for me. I pray thee dance for me. I am sad to-night. Yes, I am passing sad to-night. When I came hither I slipped in blood, which is an evil omen; and I heard, I am sure I heard in the air a beating of wings, a beating of giant wings. I cannot tell what they mean .... I am sad to-night. Therefore dance for me. Dance for me, Salomé, I beseech you. If you dance for me you may ask of me what you will, and I will give it you, even unto the half of my kingdom.
Oscar Wilde
It is glorious fun racing down the Hump, but you can't do it on windy days because then you are not there, but the fallen leaves do it instead of you. There is almost nothing that has such a keen sense of fun as a fallen leaf.
J.M. Barrie
I not only bow to the inevitable I am fortified by it.
Thornton Wilder
The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.
George Bernard Shaw
The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.
George Bernard Shaw
When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds.
Sam Shepard
There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.
Harold Pinter
Women think in [Douglas] Sirk’s films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk they think. It’s something that has to be seen. It’s great to see women think. It gives one hope. Honestly.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
There are people who are willing to protect freedom until there is nothing left of it.
Heinar Kipphardt
There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse.
Cormac McCarthy
Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part - yet nothing in the outer world is stirred. thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If I can in any way contribute to the Diversion or Improvement of the Country in which I live I shall leave it when I am summoned out of it with the secret Satisfaction of thinking that I have not lived in vain.
Joseph Addison
After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, "Oh! Life is so hard!" and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.
Anton Chekhov
I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?
Graham Greene
[Letter to William Ward, 11 July 1878]Dear Boy, Why don’t you write to me? I don’t know what has become of you.As for me I am ruined. The law suit is going against me and I am afraid I will have to pay costs, which means leaving Oxford and doing some horrid work to earn bread. The world is too much for me.However, I have seen Greece and had some golden days of youth. I go back to Oxford immediately for viva voce and then think of rowing up the river to town with Frank Miles. Will you come? YoursOscar
Oscar Wilde
If you exist tomorrow as you do today, that is a miracle! It means that thousands of bad things which may happen did not happen and you are still alive! Existence is always a miracle in this universe of chaos!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.
Gertrude Stein
Sometimes you have to succeed to see that there is nothing awesome in the thing which will be achieved!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Love with men is not a sentiment but an idea.
Mme. de Girardin
Praising what is lost makes the remembrance dear.
William Shakespeare
What about our human rights,' demanded Carl, who'd gathered a small deputation of kids within minutes. 'There is a WAR ON,' said Crewman Devlin, shortly. I wondered if this meant grown-ups actually listen to you when there wasn't a war on, because somehow I was sceptical.
Sophia McDougall
The skies are painted with unnumber'd sparks,They are all fire and every one doth shine
William Shakespeare
A cock should always know his limits and never have his eyes on the big heights like an eagle!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.
Derek Walcott