Quotes by Playwrights - Page 4

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.
George Bernard Shaw
That voice that cries out doesn't have to be a weakling's does it?
John Osborne
Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages
Elias Canetti
He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.
Cormac McCarthy
Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated: they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only “frail.” They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative, only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all: liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls.
George Bernard Shaw
If you live a long life and get to the end of it without ever once having felt crushingly depressed, then you probably haven’t been paying attention.
Duncan MacMillan
It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us to escape not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.
T.S Eliot
Alas! How sad when reasoners reason wrong.
Sophocles
We have only a little time to please the living. But all eternity to love the dead.
Sophocles
The things which give joy to you may also give you horror!
Mehmet Murat ildan
All dark and comfortless.
William Shakespeare
The best way to hold a man is in your arms.
Mae West
But there are not two laws, that was the next thing I thought I understood, not two laws, one for the healthy, another for the sick, but one only to which all must bow, rich and poor, young and old, happy and sad. He was eloquent. I pointed out that I was not sad. That was a mistake. Your papers, he said, I knew it a moment later. Not at all, I said, not at all. Your papers! he cried. Ah my papers.
Samuel Beckett
Good ideas never require guns; and if an idea requires guns, it is not a good idea!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.
William Shakespeare
Laugh represents a fragile glory of the mankind in this cruel and uncertain universe!
Mehmet Murat ildan
People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.
W Somerset Maugham
Only in youth does coincidence seem the same as fate. Later, we know that the real course of our lives is decided within us; our paths may seem to diverge from our wishes in a confused and pointless way, but in the end the way always leads us to our invisible destination.
Stefan Zweig
One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.
A.A. Milne
Everything changes but change.
Israel Zangwill
Irresolution on the schemes of life I which offer themselves to our choice and inconstancy in pursuing them are the greatest causes of all unhappiness.
Joseph Addison
Rise not alone, rise with others! If you rise alone to the top, you shall be alone at the top!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I clap my hands together. (Where do I get the strength, the burst of energy?) To chase away the ghosts. Dispel my fears. Arrange the dream. Maintain a kind of balance
Anne Hébert
Thou, my slave,As thou report'st thyself, was then her servant,And for thou wast a spirit too delicateTo act her earthy and abhorred commands,Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,By help of her more potent ministersAnd in her most unmitigable rage,Into a cloven pine, within which riftImprisoned thou didst painfully remainA dozen years; within which space she diedAnd left thee there, where thou didst vent thy groansAs fast as mill wheels strike.
William Shakespeare
It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves
Arthur Miller
There are two excellent challengers against darkness in this universe: Powerful lights and great ideas!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God.
Graham Greene
She was tall and dark-skinned and looked like a Nigerian sculpture. She moved like a lioness, her every step bristling with suppressed violence.
Bonnie Greer
The strength of your mind determines the depth of your desperation! The weaker the mind, the deeper the desperation!
Mehmet Murat ildan
These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.
Anton Chekhov
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!
William Shakespeare
I feel the life slipping out of me. When the pain comes, I cry out, but there is no prayer in it, only fear. I kneel and recite my office and the Rosary but the words are empty - dry gourds rattling in the silence. The dark is terrible and I feel so alone. I see no signs but the symbols of contradiction. I try to dispose myself to faith, hope and charity, but my will is a blown reed in the winds of despair.
Morris West
Spend your time with the people who talk about the stars because to whichever place you put your mind in, you will move to that place! Stars pull you to the stars; mud pulls you to the mud!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S Eliot
Should the whole frame of nature round him break,In ruin and confusion hurled,He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack,And stand secure amidst a falling world.
Joseph Addison
It comforted him because it could not be called suffering if it was a sign of Art.
Hermann Bahr
AESTHETICS OF INTEGRITYFor every star in the skySomeone is holding his ground.
Kenneth Koch
No herd is more herd than the mass of ignorant people!
Mehmet Murat ildan
There is only one way to be a respectful being and the way for this is very simple: Respect other beings!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A true writer should be able to write about any color. It's the story they tell that should affect people, not the race.
Dee Dee M. Scott
Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!
Edna Ferber
To think is sacred; let every person think freely! To express what you think is sacred; let every person express his thought freely! If you do this, you prove that you are a conscientious and a moral human being! If you don’t do this, you just declare yourself being fascist!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Every time the long-forgotten people of the past are remembered, they are born again!
Mehmet Murat ildan
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
William Shakespeare
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.
Oscar Wilde
Her time has come," answered Miss Lizzie. "That's why I didn't marry Harvey - long ago when he asked me. I was afraid of 'that'. So afraid." "I don't know," Miss Lizzie said. "Sometimes I think it's better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than just to be safe." She waited until the next scream died away. "At least she knows she's living.
Betty Smith
All of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love -- I scarcely dare say it -- but in love our very mistakes don't seem to be able to last long?
Thornton Wilder
Love’s language starts, stops, starts; the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.
Carol Ann Duffy
There's no such thing as a sure thing. That's why they call it gambling.
Neil Simon
The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.
Oscar Wilde
Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make 257 dollars on every (black slave) in a year, and spend only 12 or 13 dollars on his keep.
Howard Zinn
Poetry, if it is not to be a lifeless repetition of forms, must be constantly exploring "the frontiers of the spirit." But these frontiers are not like the surveys of geographical explorers, conquered once for all and settled. The frontiers of the spirit are more like the jungle which, unless continuously kept under control, is always ready to encroach and eventually obliterate the cultivated area.
T.S Eliot
After all my erstwhile dear my no longer cherished need we say it was no love just because it perished?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Men who look young act young and everlastingly harp on the fact that they are young-but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution what would be excessive in their grandfathers-are the curses of the world.
Robertson Davies
She saw night lights in the rooms of the babies who dreamed soft seersucker dreams, drugged happy with the heat, their pink baby bodies curled against worn out cotton, not fearing Hitler yet, their strong, tiny hearts beating in unison with the trees and the creeks and the bayou
Rebecca Wells
Sometimes solitude is a real heaven for the tired minds and a marvellous sanctuary for the wounded souls!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I was a woman and did not yet think of myself as a writer. I was a mapmaker.
Shay Youngblood
I know by my own experience how, from a stranger met by chance, there may come an irresistible appeal which overturns the habitual perspectives just as a gust of wind might tumble down the panels of a stage set - what had seemed near becomes infinitely remote and what had seemed distant seems to be close.
Gabriel Marcel
CORNELIA: -Sit down. Don't leave the table.GRACE: -Is that an order?CORNELIA: -I don't give orders to you, I make requests.GRACE: -Sometimes the requests of an employer are hard to distinguish from orders. [She sits down]
Tennessee Williams
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord?Or to the dreadful summit of the cliffThat beetles o'er his base into the sea,And there assume some other horrible formWhich might deprive your sovereignty of reasonAnd draw you into madness? Think of it.[The very place puts toys of desperation,Without more motive, into every brainThat looks so many fathoms to the seaAnd hears it roar beneath.]
William Shakespeare