Quotes by Playwrights - Page 184

A pessimist is a man who tells the truth prematurely.
Cyrano de Bergerac
Eve and the apple was the first great step in experimental science.
James Bridie
If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.
Daphne du Maurier
A single tree in the middle of nowhere means resistance and victory!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Trams are not free; their paths are predetermined; they must travel on the pre-designed paths! You are not a tram; your path is not predetermined; you can travel on any path! Fate is nonsense; you are free, you choose your own path with your own mind!
Mehmet Murat ildan
In the matter of war, ask this question to yourself and to your own fellow country men: Have you ever seen any politician in your country without legs, without arms, without eyes after war? No! You can’t see such a thing because honourless politicians always stay in the safe ports while they send others to the zone of death!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Since I am not actually a real human being, my emotional responses are generally limited to what I have learned to fake.
Jeff Lindsay
Have you ever thought, thought your heart would break? Wished you could cut open your chest tear it out to stop the pain? Why don´t you riot like everyone else. I don't care, life's too long. You can have any man you want. I want him...except him. Always suspected the world didn't smell of fresh paint and flowers. Smells of piss and human sweat If there could have been more moments like this.
Sarah Kane
Human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become.
Niall Williams
There are some cities in the world, they would have looked much more beautiful had they never been a city and İstanbul is such a city!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Nowadays what isn't worth saying is
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
Even in the middle of barking dogs, you can hear the footsteps of a big revolution!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Great views are like great minds. They both give you the feeling of eternity!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I came up with a pen and tablet hoping to write an immortal short story, but I've been having a dreadful time with my heroine— I CAN'T make her behave as I want her to behave; so I've abandoned her for the moment, and am writing to you.
Jean Webster
By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.
William Trevor
They walked away from the sea, Rolandsen in the lead. He kept to the edge of the road, in the snow, to leave room for the others. He was wearing light, fashionable shoes, but seemed unperturbed; he even had his coat unbuttoned in the chilly May wind. ’So that’s the church!’ said the curate. ’It looks old. I don’t suppose there’s a stove in it?’ asked his wife. ’I couldn’t say,’ Rolandsen replied, ’but I don’t think so.
Knut Hamsun
It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.
Cormac McCarthy
An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.
Maxim Gorky
The prince of darkness is a gentleman!
William Shakespeare
Love ceases to be a pleasure when it ceases to be a secret.
Aphra Behn
He disregarded everything, he gave everything to art. He tirelessly visited galleries, spent whole hours standing before the works of great masters, grasped and pursued a wondrous brush. He never finished anything without testing himself several times by these great teachers and reading wordless but eloquent advice for himself in their paintings.
Nikolai Gogol
We are unimportant creatures in this universe. We are all alone for the moment. Nobody has ever sent us any holy book or whatsoever. To survive in this universe we must first understand that nobody can help us, nobody but ourselves! To be important creatures in this universe means is to be able to shape this universe in such a way that our existence become everlasting!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It is not alone what we do but also what we do not do for which we are accountable.
Molière
The first and last schoolmaster of life is living and committing oneself unreservedly and dangerously to living; to men who know this an Aristotle and a Plato have much to say; but those who have imposed cautions on themselves and petrified themselves in a system of ideas, them the masters themselves will lead into error
Thornton Wilder
You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Neither the stone that made you stumble is your enemy, nor the stone that helped you cross the river is your friend! Universe just lives its own life!
Mehmet Murat ildan
He thinks money spent on a home is money wasted. He's lived too much in hotels. Never the best hotels, of course. Second-rate hotels. He doesn't understand a home. He doesn't feel at home in it. And yet, he wants a home. He's even proud of having this shabby place. He loves it here.
Eugene O'Neill
To die is a debt we must all of us discharge.
Euripides
The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.
T.S Eliot
The royal throne of kings this scepter'd isle This earth of majesty this seat of Mars This other Eden demi-paradise This fortress built by nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war This happy breed of men this little world This precious stone set in the silver sea.
William Shakespeare
For Art may err but Nature cannot miss.
John Dryden
I do not insist," answered Don Quixote, "that this is a full adventure, but it is the beginning of one, for this is the way adventures begin.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Yo me salgo desnudo a la calle,maduro de versos perdidos.I step naked into the streetripe with lost poems.
Federico García Lorca
...that in former ages they had been as wise as they are in this present, nay, wiser; for, said they, many in this age do think their forefathers have been fools, by which they prove themselves to be such.
Margaret Cavendish
Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
Oscar Wilde
Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!
Jean Cocteau
The people are the city.
William Shakespeare
We all of us complain of the shortness of time, saith Seneca, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives, says he, are spent either in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do: we are always complaining our days are few, and acting as though there would no end of them."- On the Right Use of Time
Joseph Addison
Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.
Samuel Beckett
Time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves. We lose as much to life as we do to death.
Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
Open the curtains of your mind! If there is light outside, it will come in; if there is light inside, it will go out! Keep the curtains open!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When private bands of fanatics commit atrocities we call them "terrorists," which they are, and have no trouble dismissing their reasons. But when governments do the same, and on a much larger scale, the word "terrorism" is not used, and we consider it a sign of our democracy that the acts become subject to debate. If the word "terrorism" has a useful meaning (and I believe it does, because it marks off an act as intolerable, since it involves the indiscriminate use of violence against human beings for some political purpose), then it applies exactly to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Howard Zinn
April is the crudest month breeding Lilacs out of the dead land mixing Memory and desire stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
T.S Eliot
Handsome is that handsome does.
Henry Fielding
I’m not afraid of the darkness outside. It’s the darkness inside houses I don’t like.
Shelagh Delaney
Nine-nine of every hundred among you probably desire peace, while the balance may hold war a condition to be preferred; but what can be the mental norm of statesmanship where such a minority conquer the peace-lovers?
Eden Phillpotts
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.
Gertrude Stein
Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are to accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.
Yukio Mishima
... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Now I want you to remember something because I don't think we shall meet again very soon. It is this; however fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, think and live fashionably; virtue and honour will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed, self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honour will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so. In short, Davey, God is not dead. And I can assure you God is not mocked.
Robertson Davies
the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.
Oscar Wilde
One can easily forget his destination when walking in a marvellous path towards his destination! The attraction of the path can be much stronger than the attraction of the target!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.
William Shakespeare
Man! What are you? Who are you? Just a shadow in this universe! You always forget this and the truth will always remind you what you really are! Do you want to be a real thing, not just a shadow? Improve your science ten thousand times; improve your science hundred thousand times! If you can’t improve your science, you will remain as a miserable shadow!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Wit ought to be a glorious treat, like caviar. Never spread it about like marmalade.
Noël Coward
It is only when I dally with what I am about look back and aside instead of keeping my eyes straight forward that I feel these cold sinkings of the heart. But the first broadside puts all to rights.
Sir Walter Scott
Weaving spiders, come not here, Hence, you long legged spinners, hence! Beetles black, approach not here, worm nor snail, do no offense.
William Shakespeare
People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.
Oscar Wilde
Podtyagin considers whether to take offence or not -- and decides to take offence.
Anton Chekhov
Adversity's sweet milk philosophy.
William Shakespeare