Quotes by Playwrights - Page 168

Talented person is talented everywhere.
Lion Feuchtwanger
People are always talking about it being their duty to find their way to their fellow men — to their neighbour, as they are forever saying with all the baseness of false sentiment — when in fact it is purely and simply a question of finding their way to themselves. Let each first find his way to himself! And since hardly anyone has yet found his way to himself, it is inconceivable that any of these unfortunate millions has ever found his way to another human being — or to his neighbour, as they say, dripping with self-deception.
Thomas Bernhard
Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can read printed words! For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But, one day, she looked at a page and the word "mouse" had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word, and a picture of a gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further and when she saw "horse," she heard him pawing the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word "running" hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between he individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance. She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read!From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came to adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.
Betty Smith
No friend to Love like a long voyage at sea.
Aphra Behn
My only love sprung from my only hate.
William Shakespeare
She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.
Oscar Wilde
Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement - as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements. Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary...
Brian Friel
Pain may be the only reality but if mankind had any sense it would pursue the delusion called happiness. All the philosophers and poets who tell us that pain and suffering have a place and purpose in the cosmic order of things are welcome to them. They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves.
Kiran Nagarkar
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
George Bernard Shaw
We take unholy risks to prove we are what we cannot be. For instance, I am not even crazy.
Amiri Baraka
The man of courage thinks not of himself. Help the oppressed and put thy trust in God.
Friedrich Schiller
Make use of time let not advantage slip.
William Shakespeare
Here now in his triumph where all things falter, Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
But while they continued staring into one another’s face waiting for the miracle of science the pain grew worse.
Thornton Wilder
The lamp hummed:'Regard the moon,La lune ne garde aucune rancune,She winks a feeble eye,She smiles into corners.She smoothes the hair of the grass.The moon has lost her memory.A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,Her hand twists a paper rose,That smells of dust and old Cologne,She is aloneWith all the old nocturnal smellsThat cross and cross across her brain."The reminiscence comesOf sunless dry geraniumsAnd dust in crevices,Smells of chestnuts in the streets,And female smells in shuttered rooms,And cigarettes in corridorsAnd cocktail smells in bars.
T.S Eliot
If your friend goes to a far place, that far place comes close to you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It is winter time! Feed the birds! Teach your children to feed the birds! Request your neighbour to feed the birds! Encourage your friends to feed the birds!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I, too, sing America.I am the darker brother.They send me to eat in the kitchenWhen company comes,But I laugh,And eat well,And grow strong.Tomorrow,I'll be at the tableWhen company comes.Nobody'll dareSay to me,"Eat in the kitchen,"Then.Besides,They'll see how beautiful I amAnd be ashamed--I, too, am America.
Langston Hughes
Have you got stuck in a period of time where you loved or you were loved once? Come back to the present time, because present time is the only time you can do something real about your fate!
Mehmet Murat ildan
One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
George Bernard Shaw
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.
Niall Williams
Women may fail when there is no strength in man
William Shakespeare
When hopeful and hopeless come together, both will learn great things from each other: Hopeful will learn the horror of being hopeless and the hopeless will learn the beauty of being hopeful!
Mehmet Murat ildan
There is thy gold, worse poison to men's souls,Doing more murder in this loathsome world,Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.
William Shakespeare
He was top-heavy with conceit.
J.M. Barrie
Foul words is but foul wind, and foul wind is but foul breath, and foul breath is noisome; therefore I will depart unkissed.
William Shakespeare
Liberty of conscience (when people have consciences) is rightly considered the most indispensable of liberties.
Haddon Chambers
A man who gets up very early creates a new day within the same day!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.
Nikolai Gogol
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Miguel de Cervantes
Are you looking for a wealth in life? Fool! Life is the wealth itself!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder
Why then the world's mine oyster Which I with sword will open.
William Shakespeare
The child was diseased at birth - stricken with an hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty - the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.
Eugene O'Neill
When you leave a port, ask yourself two questions: What mark you have made on that port and what have you learned from that port?
Mehmet Murat ildan
Have not we affections and desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?
William Shakespeare
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
George Bernard Shaw
Is it possible to have memories from the future? Yes, it is! Just dream about the future and these dreams will take their places on your memories, they will be your memories from the future!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Meggie Folchart: Having writer's block? Maybe I can help.Fenoglio: Oh yes, that's right. You want to be a writer, don't you?Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it's a bad thing.Fenoglio: Oh no, it's just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world you create on the page seems more friendly and alive than the world you actually live in.
David Lindsay-Abaire
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
Lillian Hellman
Fear is the start of wisdom.
Miguel de Unamuno
A man who under the influence of mental pain or unbearably oppressive suffering sends a bullet through his own head is called a suicide; but for those who give freedom to their pitiful, soul-debasing passions in the holy days of spring and youth there is no name in man's vocabulary. After the bullet follows the peace of the grave: ruined youth is followed by years of grief and painful recollections. He who has profaned his spring will understand the present condition of my soul. I am not yet old, or grey, but I no longer live. Psychiaters tell us that a solider, who was wounded at Waterloo, went mad, and afterwards assured everybody - and believed it himself - that he had died at Waterloo, and that what was now considered to be him was only his shadow, a reflection of the past. I am now experiencing something resembling this semi-death..
Anton Chekhov
I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.
Samuel Beckett
Sure I love the dear silver that shines in your hair And the brow that's all furrowed and wrinkled with care. I kiss the dear fingers so toil-worn for me Oh God bless you and keep you Mother Machree.
Rida Johnson Young
The secret angels of God are only as alive as the marble angels of Michelangelo!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Courage is to take hard knocks like a man when occasion calls.
Plautus
A mind that tastes the grief obtains a good chance to travel to the Land of Wisdom!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When you leave the light behind you, shadows and darkness become your guide!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Let me die the moment my love dies. Let me not outlive my own capacity to love. Let me die still loving, and so, never die.
Mary Zimmerman
And it seemed increasingly obvious that the world would have to topple if he was to attain the glory that was rightfully his. They were consubstantial: glory and the capsized world.
Yukio Mishima
Courage is very important. Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.
Ruth Gordon
Envy is the most stupid of vices for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.
Honoré de Balzac
I forgot they were talking about me. They sound so wonderfully convincing.
Jean Giraudoux
Poetry is a hook for memory
Gillian Clarke
It is not true that life is one damn thing after another- it's one damn thing over and over.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Friendship of itself a holy tie is made more sacred by adversity.
John Dryden
Golden lads and girls all must, like chimmney-sweepers, come to dust.
William Shakespeare
Let weakness learn meekness.
A. C. Swinburne
Small children will talk to anyone, once the guard of shyness has fallen, and they have, like the elderly, a sense of immediacy, a need to say or do something, now, now, the minute it is thought of, combined with that other sense, of the complete irrelevance of time.
Susan Hill
If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.
Cormac McCarthy