Quotes by Playwrights - Page 50

Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss.
Oscar Wilde
And what has been so awful in your life that you have to write about it?” Mrs Lincoln, a definite gall bladder, persevered.
Larry Kramer
She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.
W Somerset Maugham
In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?
Oscar Wilde
We must thank to all the failed people in the history as they showed us the true way to success!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The strictest justice is sometimes the greatest injustice.
Terence
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
Oscar Wilde
Some countries and some people are so primitively religious and so underdeveloped that they don’t need a time machine to go back to the past; they are already in there, in the very distant and dark past!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Those who love the rain much cannot long remain dry!
Mehmet Murat ildan
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw
Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other's naked hearts.
Tennessee Williams
If the path is beautiful, all you have to do when walking in that path is to be beautiful so as to not ruin the beauty of the path!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.
W Somerset Maugham
true apothecary thy drugs art quick
William Shakespeare
It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it: I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so. But it doesn't strike me. At heart, I am even shocked that anyone can attribute qualities of this kind to it, as if you called a clod of earth or a block of stone beautiful or ugly.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.
Susan Hill
Listen to me: die after me, all right? I don't care what else you do, where you go, how you screw up your life, just... survive. Outlive me, please.
Tracy Letts
Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he's in his office.
Joseph Heller
The goodness you do might fail; but keep doing it, because the real failure is never doing goodness!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Ardour in well-doing is a misleading and a treacherous thing. It cries out loudly for employment; you can't satisfy it at first; it wants more and more; it is eager to move mountains and divert the course of rivers. It isn't content till it perspires. And then, too often, when it feels the perspiration on its brow, it wearies all of a sudden and dies, without even putting itself to the trouble of saying, "I've had enough of this.
Arnold Bennett
Keep your heart infinitesimally small and sorrow will never spy it, never plunge, never flap away with your heart in her claws.
Emma Donoghue
But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.
Betty Smith
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is the example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
Jean Giraudoux
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
William Shakespeare
Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it's full of surprises, and you're constantly getting fucked.
David Mamet
Art is our endless desire to turn the mortal things into the immortal things!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Jim looks out the car window with his nose pressed to the glass. Sometimes he pretends to be asleep. Not because he is tired, but because he needs to be quiet.
Rachel Joyce
I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!
Oscar Wilde
And worse I may be yet: the worst is notSo long as we can say 'This is the worst.
William Shakespeare
O Space and Time and stars at strife,How dreadful your infinity!Shrined by your termless trinity,How strange, how terrible, is life!(“The Testimony of the Suns”)
George Sterling
Better a humble heart, a lowly life. Untouched by greatness let me live - and live. Not too little, not too much: there safety lies.
Euripides
[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.
Antonin Artaud
One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Men are April when they woo December when they wed maids are May when they are maids but the sky changes when they are wives.
William Shakespeare
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.
Tom Stoppard
Just because you are living in a stupid country, you don’t have to be stupid! Isolate yourself from the fools! Protect your mind to be poisoned by the deceitful media, by the dishonest politicians, by the primitive culture and the illogical traditions! Rise above the lownesses of the system like a falcon rising from the marshland and start shining like a star for others to see you and to come near to you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Foaly: Anyone see you come in here? Holly: The FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, MI6. Oh, and the EIB. Foaly: The EIB? Holly: (smirking) Everyone in the building.
Eoin Colfer
If you always read the same old ideas, what progress can you make in the name of discovering new paths?
Mehmet Murat ildan
The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers; but a moment's reflection will shew that this utilitarian application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the shedding of blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a mangy sheep or an ox with the rinderpest: it calls down divine wrath instead of appeasing it. In doing it we offer God as a sacrifice the gratification of our own revenge and the protection of our own lives without cost to ourselves; and cost to ourselves is the essence of sacrifice and expiation.
George Bernard Shaw
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,To the last syllable of recorded time;And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,And then is heard no more. It is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
I don't think that women ought to sit down at table with men. It ruins conversation and I'm sure it's very bad for them. It puts ideas in their heads, and women are never at ease with themselves when they have ideas.
W Somerset Maugham
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself, but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.
Antonin Artaud
If you speak, that is rain; if you speak too much, that is flood!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Yes! That's what all our talk about a decent world has been... just so much bullshit.""We did say it was still only a dream.""And a bloody useless one at that. Life's a fuck-up and it's never going to change.
Athol Fugard
In the eyes of high morality, to be a victim is always more honourable than to be a killer!
Mehmet Murat ildan
So, I’m a playwright. In Minneapolis. Which means that I find myself operating in a pretty lefty crowd, most of the time. And most of my energy goes towards arguing with that, and musing about how I really fucking can’t stand Democrats. So I was startled to be reminded of a fact that I’d almost entirely forgotten: I really fucking can’t stand Republicans.
Phillip Andrew Bennett Low
You want to survive in this universe? Then you are in a no-choice-positon! You have no choice but to be strong, you have no choice but to be hopeful, you have no choice but to be clever and challenger!
Mehmet Murat ildan
They were all fitting into place, the jig-saw pieces. The odd strained shapes that I had tried to piece together with my fumbling fingers and they had never fitted. Frank's odd manner when I spoke about Rebecca. Beatrice and her rather diffident negative attitude. The silence that I had always taken for sympathy and regret was a silence born of shame and embarrassment. It seemed incredible to me now that I had never understood. I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great wall in front of them that hid the truth. This was what I had done. I had built up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth. Had I made one step forward out of my own shyness Maxim would have told these things four months, five months ago.
Daphne du Maurier
When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting
Dodie Smith
Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.
Friedrich von Schiller
In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.
Honoré de Balzac
I like reality. It tastes of bread.
Jean Anouilh
I go, I go away, I walk, I wander, and everywhere I go I bear my shell with me, I remain at home in my room, among my books, I do not approach an inch nearer to Marrakech or Timbuktu. Even if I took a train, a boat, or a motor-bus, if I went to Morocco for my holiday, if I suddenly arrived at Marrakech, I should be always in my room, at home. And if I walked in the squares and in the sooks, if I gripped an Arab's shoulder, to feel Marrakech in his person - well, that Arab would be at Marrakech, not I : I should still be seated in my room, placid and meditative as is my chosen life, two thousand miles away from the Moroccan and his burnoose. In my room. Forever.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A beautiful rain is a treasure box. Inside this magical box there is an artistic umbrella, there is a pretty rainbow, there is a sweet bird singing and there is a lovely smell of earth! Something wonderful has a great potential to create some other wonderful things!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You will desperately realise the necessity of casting anchor to somewhere or being chained to someone or something when you are drifting in the emptiness of life!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It’s the body and eyes that tell what a person is thinking or going to do.
Louis Nowra
When we imagine ourselves to be in a state of mind, no matter what, we are in that state of mind, and thus in that state of illness which we imagine ourselves to be in, in every state that we imagine ourselves in.
Thomas Bernhard
I don’t feel very much like Pooh today," said Pooh."There there," said Piglet. "I’ll bring you tea and honey until you do.
A.A. Milne
Chaucer I confess is a rough diamond and must be polished e'er he shines.
John Dryden
But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.
Thornton Wilder