Quotes by Playwrights - Page 48

They who love dancing too much seem to have more brains in their feet than in their head.
Terence
If ever again we happened to lose our balance, just when sleepwalking through the same dream on the brink of hell’s valley, if ever the magical mare (whom I ride through the night air hollowed out into caverns and caves where wild animals live) in a crazy fit of anger over some word I might have said without the perfect sweetness that works on her like a charm, if ever the magic Mare looks over her shoulder and whinnies: “So! You don’t love me!” and bucks me off, sends me flying to the hyenas, if ever the paper ladder that I climb so easily to go pick stars for Promethea—at the very instant that I reach out my hand and it smells like fresh new moon, so good, it makes you believe in god’s genius—if ever at that very instant my ladder catches fire—because it is so fragile, all it would take is someone’s brushing against it tactlessly and all that would be left is ashes—if ever I had the dreadful luck again to find myself falling screaming down into the cruel guts of separation, and emptying all my being of hope, down to the last milligram of hope, until I am able to melt into the pure blackness of the abyss and be no more than night and a death rattle,I would really rather not be tumbling around without my pencil and paper.
Hélène Cixous
I am not gamesome: I do lack some partof that quick spirit that is in Antony.
William Shakespeare
The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I remember those happy days and often wish I could speak into the ears of the dead the gratitude which was due to them in life and so ill-returned.
Gwyn Thomas
I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more, is none
William Shakespeare
The thing about having a baby is that thereafter you have it.
Jean Kerr
If you can’t control it, you will be the toy of your own mind!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Darkness can always visit us; when it comes, we shall light a candle to welcome it!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Get away from these two types of people: the ones who think you can only go as far as the situation you were born into and the ones who think you can only go as far as the current situation you are in.
Dee Dee M. Scott
Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there's the trick!
Mikhail Bulgakov
I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.
Mae West
It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis a purging of pity and terror, Which Aristotle tells is the object of art. Everything is transformed by his power into material and by writing it he can overcome it. Everything is grist to his mill. ... The artist is the only free man.
W Somerset Maugham
What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night,So stumblest on my counsel?*Who are you? Why do you hide in the darkness and listen to my private thoughts?*
William Shakespeare
The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
Alan Bennett
Happy the man and happy he alone He who can call today his own: He who secure within can say Tomorrow do thy worst for I have liv'd today.
John Dryden
He who labors diligently need never despair for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor.
Menander
When skies above were not yet namedNor earth below pronounced by nameThere was water...
Carol K. Mack
The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.
Oscar Wilde
Because things are the way they are things will not stay the way they are.
Bertolt Brecht
Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.
William Trevor
I feel an army in my fist.
Friedrich Schiller
If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended,That you have but slumbered hereWhile these visions did appear.And this weak and idle theme,No more yielding but a dream,Gentles, do not reprehend:If you pardon, we will mend:And, as I am an honest Puck,If we have unearned luckNow to 'scape the serpent's tongue,We will make amends ere long;Else the Puck a liar call;So, good night unto you all.Give me your hands, if we be friends,And Robin shall restore amends.
William Shakespeare
You tell them one real thing and then the doctor thinks he knows you. He starts getting arrogant and overfamiliar, making insulting suggestions left and right. You have to protest constantly just to set the record straight. Finally he makes offensive assumptions and throws them in your face. A stranger in a bar could do the same…
Sarah Schulman
...the more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the more it hungers after the sweet things of life. And we, wrapped round in rags of our virtues, and regarding others through the mist of our self-sufficiency, and persuaded of our universal impeccability, do not understand this.
Maxim Gorky
One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
Alan Bennett
Fortune favours the bold.
Terence
Schelling's God is the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the struggle has got, with the animals not too far behind, vegetables somewhat lagging, and rocks nowhere as yet. Do we believe this? Does it matter? Think of it as a poem or a painting. Art doesn't have to be true like a theorem. It can be true in other ways. This truth says there is a meaning to it all, and Man is where the meaning begins to show.
Tom Stoppard
It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God - who knows all that can be known - seems powerless to change.
Cormac McCarthy
Difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
I might have known,” said Eeyore. “After all, one can’t complain. I have my friends. Somebody spoke to me only yesterday. And was it last week or the week before that Rabbit bumped into me and said ‘Bother!’. The Social Round. Always something going on.
A.A. Milne
A city full of art is a city full of wit!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To provoke laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
Honoré de Balzac
Renton looks at her and sees her pain and anger. It cuts himup. It confuses him. Kelly has a great sense of humour. What's wrong with her? The knee–jerkthought: Wrong time of the' month is forming in his head when he looks about and picks up theintonations of the laughter around the bar. It's not funny laughter.This is lynch mob laughter.How was ah tae know, he thinks. How the fuck was ah tae know?
Irvine Welsh
The Right Honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.
R. B. Sheridan
We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience
Honoré de Balzac
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Graham Greene
A beautiful smile without any reason is the smile of the existence!
Mehmet Murat ildan
MURRY: Why do we even celebrate the New Year? It's just this arbitrary quirk of how we measure time in years, right? Midnight tonight is the very same transition from day to day that we do every 24 hours. But this thing in my hands, it feels real in a way the numbered calendar box never does. Why? What makes midnight tonight any different?
Hillary DePiano
If it is necessary for us to do anything [in view of peace], direct us and architect.πρὸς τάδ’ ἡμῖν, εἴ τι χρὴ δρᾶν, φράζε κἀρχιτεκτόνει.
Aristophanes
You were what you were and you are what you are. Fuck that regrets bullshit.
Irvine Welsh
They laid up in the shade of a rock shelf until past noon, scratching out a place in the gray lava dust to sleep, and they set forth in the afternoon down the valley following the war trail and they were very small and they moved very slowly in the immensity of that landscape.Come evening they hove toward the rimrock again and Sproule pointed out a dark stain on the face of the barren cliff. It looked like the black from old fires. The kid shielded his eyes. The scalloped canyon walls rippled in the heat like drapery folds.
Cormac McCarthy
Unsex me here and fill me from crown to toe full of direst cruelty That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose." Macbeth
William Shakespeare
There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
Oscar Wilde
America — rather, the United States — seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warmhearted, overfriendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures. Its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The schnuckle among the nations of the world.
Edna Ferber
moonlight the falsest the most languid the most petit-bourgeoisstrikes meI like it
Nâzım Hikmet
The Constitution. . . illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law--all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity.
Howard Zinn
O serpent heart hid with a flowering face!Did ever a dragon keep so fair a cave?Beautiful tyrant, feind angelical, dove feather raven, wolvish-ravening lamb! Despised substance of devinest show, just opposite to what thou justly seemest - A dammed saint, an honourable villain!
William Shakespeare
once ruffle-skirted vanity table where I primped at thirteen, opening drawers to a private chaos of eyeshadows lavender teal sky-blue, swarms of hair pins pony tail fasteners, stashes of powders, colonies of tiny lipsticks (p.39)
Barbara Blatner
Thou shalt not stir one foot to seek a foe.
William Shakespeare
So overjoyed were they at their deliverance that they laughed aloud, and the Earth seemed to them like a flower of silver, and the Moon like a flower of gold.
Oscar Wilde
Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
Thornton Wilder
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
Christopher Hampton
Pooh," said Rabbit kindly, "you haven't any brain." "I know," said Pooh humbly.
A.A. Milne
Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.
Anna Deavere Smith
Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
W Somerset Maugham
SNAPE: Sometimes costs are made to be borne.
Jack Thorne
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven.
William Shakespeare
It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.
Elizabeth Alexander
The moments you feel to give up your life can create the best moments to grasp fully the meaning of your life!
Mehmet Murat ildan