Quotes by Playwrights - Page 54

RICH I’m lamenting. I’ve lost my innocence.CROMWELL You lost that some time ago. If you’ve only just noticed, it can’t have been very important to you.
Robert Bolt
The thing about a diversion is that it has to be diverting.
Eoin Colfer
He had in those days imagined himself capable of extraordinary heroisms and endurances which would make the girl he loved forget the awkward hands and the spotty chin of adolescence. Everything had seemed possible. One could laugh at daydreams, but so long as you had the capacity to daydream there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities of which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time form a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind, until one day to your own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in.
Graham Greene
Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither ripeness is all.
William Shakespeare
Hate is a lack of imagination.
Graham Greene
My imagination longs to dash ahead and plan developments; but I have noticed that when things happen in one's imagination, they never happen in one's life.
Dodie Smith
The more you exaggerate, the more you will look funny!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Unrest and uncertainty are our lot.
Johann von Goethe
And starward drifts the stricken world,Lone in unalterable gloomDead, with a universe for tomb,Dark, and to vaster darkness whirled.(“The Testimony of the Suns”)
George Sterling
Whether we fall by ambition, blood or lustLike diamonds, we are cut with our own dust
John Webster
It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest.
W Somerset Maugham
When you look at a natural beauty, it also looks at you! Since both the viewer and the viewed are miracles, two miracles look at each other in admiration!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.
Jean Anouilh
Young hearts have their unfathomable depths.
Knut Hamsun
A picture tells a thousand words. But you get a thousand pictures from someone's voice.
Paul Fleischman
Hot from hell. Caesar's spirit raging in revenge. Cry,havoc! And let slip the dogs of war.
William Shakespeare
I remind you that I have no faith. If I sought God, I find myself.
Henry de Montherlant
I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
Antonin Artaud
Women have a passion for mathematics. They divide their age in half, double the price of their clothes, and always add at least five years to the age of their best friend.
Marcel Achard
There was a patient who sat with her family in a circle around her, all holding hands. Sister Philomena asked if they would like to join her for prayers and they said yes, they would. They closed their eyes as Sister Philomena whispered the words and I thought this must be the nearest humans get to whatever God is, when they hold hands and listen.
Rachel Joyce
Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.
Cormac McCarthy
Where shall we three meet again in thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurlyburly 's done, when the battle 's lost and won
William Shakespeare
I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing
Gertrude Stein
In his business, he observed human nature and came to certain conclusions about it. The conclusions lacked wisdom and originality; in fact, they were tiresome. But they were important to McGarrity because he had figured them out for himself. In the first years of their marriage, he had tried to tell Mae about these conclusions, but all she said was, "I can imagine." Sometimes she varied by saying, "I can just imagine." Gradually then, because he could not share his inner self with her, he lost the power of being a husband to her, and she was unfaithful to him.
Betty Smith
A rose is a rose is a rose.
Gertrude Stein
Nature says to a woman: 'Be beautiful if you can wise if you want to but be respected that is essential.'
Pierre Beaumarchais
It is always possible that society you live in might go backwards, towards the land of ignorance and darkness! While this tragedy and stupidity happening, you must move forward! You must walk forward, towards the light and wisdom, to the land of reason!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,And for thy maintenance; commits his bodyTo painful labor, both by sea and land;To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,Whilst thou li’st warm at home, secure and safe;And craves no other tribute at thy handsBut love, fair looks, and true obedience-Too little payment for so great a debt.Such duty as the subject owes the prince,Even such a woman oweth to her husband;And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,And no obedient to his honest will,What is she but a foul contending rebel,And graceless traitor to her loving lord?I asham’d that women are so simple‘To offer war where they should kneel for peace,Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth,Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,But that our soft conditions, and our hearts,Should well agree with our external parts?
William Shakespeare
I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only anoblique consideration will be found here of man; it’s up to him to saywhere his masculinity and femininity are at: this will concern us oncemen have opened their eyes and seen themselves clearly.
Hélène Cixous
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
Honoré de Balzac
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim
Graham Greene
A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart.
Robertson Davies
Leave city, leave reality; enter forest, enter fantasy!
Mehmet Murat ildan
In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thing like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.
Emma Donoghue
I want to get out of here means I want to be innocent.
Kathy Acker
The summer's flower is to the summer sweetThough to itself it only live and die
William Shakespeare
A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
Arthur Miller
The abundance of beards in periods of social unrest, times of revolt or upheaval, should be noted. It's the handiest way people have of making themselves mysterious.
Mihail Sebastian
O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, / That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
William Shakespeare
Meditation is mind’s vacation!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.
Wilsin Mizner
O hell! to choose love by another's eye.
William Shakespeare
Those whom the gods love grow young.
Oscar Wilde
MURRY: It's not that, it's just… I don't really get it. I usually find myself staring at the midnight deadline filled with regrets both for opportunities and loved ones missed. It's another day closer to the end. The last thing I feel like doing is counting down to some wild celebration. It just seems so sad to say goodbye to a year and know that it’s gone forever and you can’t go back to it. Not to relive, not to correct.NOEL: I've never thought about it that way.MURRY: There's something so final about it. It's the period at the end of the sentence.NOEL: The New Year's resolution.
Hillary DePiano
As soon as he had disappeared Deborah made for the trees fringing the lawn, and once in the shrouded wood felt herself safe.She walked softly along the alleyway to the pool. The late sun sent shafts of light between the trees and onto the alleyway, and a myriad insects webbed their way in the beams, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder. But were they insects, wondered Deborah, or particles of dust, or even split fragments of light itself, beaten out and scattered by the sun?It was very quiet. The woods were made for secrecy. They did not recognise her as the garden did. ("The Pool")
Daphne du Maurier
Stiff in opinion always in the wrong.
John Dryden
Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.
Oscar Wilde
Anger is a rough water; if you can canalize it into a watermill, you can benefit from it. Anything bad can be transformed into good.
Mehmet Murat ildan
There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dénouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display.
Oscar Wilde
As it is?
Harold Pinter
In one of their quarrels, they had begun calling each other Mister. and Misses., and since then they had never made it up enough to change it.
Carson McCullers
Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.
Tony Kushner
Dying is a dull, dreary affair. my advice is that you have nothing whatever to with it.
W Somerset Maugham
And too soon Marred are those so early Made.
William Shakespeare
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: … But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I'm neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.(Act I., lines 132-140)
Oscar Wilde
This free-will business is a bit terrifying anyway. It's almost pleasanter to obey and make the most of it.
Ugo Betti
This new book is going to get itself finished— and published! You see if it doesn't.
Jean Webster
When climbing, you don’t have to put your foot on every step, jump over some of them! When solving your problems, you don’t have to solve each and every one, jump over some of them!
Mehmet Murat ildan
But if I am young, thou shouldest look to my merits, not to my years.
Sophocles
You can read all the books in the world on the Nazi concentration camps and the gas chambers, and yet reality will draw upon you only when you are put through that yourself. It is a law of God, or nature, if you prefer, that pain, suffering and grief cannot be transferred or known by proxy. Neither empathy nor sympathy but experience alone is a valid currency of affliction. It alone makes you a card-holding member all allows you to join the club of the wretched of the earth. All else is counterfeit.
Kiran Nagarkar