Quotes by Playwrights - Page 77

The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?
William Saroyan
He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
Cormac McCarthy
Is your country under great dangers? Light is gone and the darkness is everywhere? You don’t know whom to trust and what to do? Read the history of your country! There you will find out the best map for the way out!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
Jean Cocteau
A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
Cormac McCarthy
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
A need for many candles may arise in every nation’s history to light up the darkness in the country. Most of the time, the youth is the very candles themselves!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as if it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.
Oscar Wilde
And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another.
Samuel Beckett
This free will business is a bit terrifying anyway. It's almost pleasanter to obey, and make the most of it.
Ugo Betti
Don't even try making out I’m making this up. I’ve got proof. Evidence.
Diane Samuels
Earth is a heaven but man often creates many hells within this heaven and a fascist country is one of the hottest and the most suffocating hell amongst all those hells!
Mehmet Murat ildan
...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice...Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.
Alan Bennett
I think women need kindness more than love. When one human being is kind to another it's a very deep matter.
Alice Childress
Nor did he think of Celia any more, though he could sometimes remember having dreamt of her. If only he had been able to think of her, he would not have needed to dream of her.
Samuel Beckett
Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on... The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.
Oscar Wilde
Dear little Swallow,’ said the Prince, ‘you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery.
Oscar Wilde
Not fooling around, not bothering nobody, just sitting here mending the Primus," said the cat with a hostile frown, "and, moreover, I consider it my duty to warn you that the cat is an ancient, inviolable animal.
Mikhail Bulgakov
Sun is a cosmic hand which tries to reach you wherever you are!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I suddenly knew that religion, God - something beyond everyday life - was there to be found, provided one is really willing. And I saw that though what I felt in the church was only imagination, it was a step on the way; because imagination itself can be a kind of willingness - a pretense that things are real, due to one's longing for them. It struck me that this was somehow tied up with what the Vicar said about religion being an extension of art - and then I had a glimpse of how religion can really cure you of sorrow; somehow make use of it, turn it to beauty, just as art can make sad things beautiful.tI found myself saying: 'Sacrifice is the secret - you have to sacrifice things for art and it's the same with religion; and then the sacrifice turns out to be a gain.' Then I got confused and I couldn't hold on to what I meant - until Miss Blossom remarked: 'Nonsense, duckie - it's prefectly simple. You lose yourself in something beyond yourself and it's a lovely rest.'I saw that, all right. Then I thought: 'But that's how Miss Marcy cured her sorrow, too - only she lost herself in other people instead of in religion.' Which way of life was best - hers or the Vicar's? I decided that he loves God and merely likes the villagers, whereas she loves the villagers and merely likes God - and then I suddenly wondered if I could combine both ways, love God and my neighbor equally. Was I really willing to?
Dodie Smith
All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.
Richard Hughes
The Ph.D is one of the chosen who know that some things can never be fathomed, no matter how hard you try. What good are explanations? There is no possibility of explaining how such a work [Mozart's Requiem, in the instance] could ever have come into being. (The same holds true for certain poems, which should not be analyzed either.)
Elfriede Jelinek
The sun will rise whether you like it or not, whether you oppose it or not, whether you care about it or not! Some things will happen whatever you think and whatever you feel about them!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Light heat all known all white heart breath no sound.
Samuel Beckett
God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.
William Nicholson
No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with so many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place.
Elfriede Jelinek
Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room - a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. Full of the glitter and the frenzy of night, the horn thundered in, conveying from the distant offing, from the dead center of the sea, a thirst for the dark nectar in the little room.
Yukio Mishima
The play was a great success but the audience was a disaster.
Oscar Wilde
You cannot do anything good for a dead man! Whatever goodness you want to do for him, do it when he is alive!
Mehmet Murat ildan
There's a time for all things.
William Shakespeare
We were perfectly decorous together. It took the will of both of us. I trusted him with me, and myself with him.
Ronald Frame
I can't look at everything hard enough!
Thornton Wilder
The way we are living,timorous or bold,will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
It is easier to begin well than to finish well.
Plautus
The Lord doesn't want anybody in His house who has to be dragged there.
Frank D. Gilroy
Bloom of adulthood. Try a whiff of that. On your back in the dark you remember. Ah you remember. Cloudless May day. She joins you in the little summerhouse. Entirely of logs. Both larch and fir. Six feet across. Eight from floor to vertex. Area twenty-four square feet to the furthest decimal. Two small multicoloured lights vis-a-vis. Small stained diamond panes. Under each a ledge. There on summer Sundays after his midday meal your father loved to retreat with Punch and a cushion. The waist of his trousers unbuttoned he sat on the one ledge and turned the pages. You on the other your feet dangling. When he chuckled you tried to chuckle too. When his chuckle died yours too. That you should try to imitate his chuckle pleased and amused him greatly and sometimes he would chuckle for no other reason than to hear you try to chuckle too. Sometimes you turn your head and look out through a rose-red pane. You press your little nose against the pane and all without is rosy. The years have flown and there at the same place as then you sit in the bloom of adulthood bathed in rainbow light gazing before you. She is late.
Samuel Beckett
Ah earth you old extinguisher.
Samuel Beckett
Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.
W Somerset Maugham
Every one of us see many nightmares every day, not in our sleeps but with our very own eyes: The poverty! The most real and the most common nightmare of all times!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Earth can live longer then the humanity or the humanity can live longer than the earth! Both are possible!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.
William Saroyan
In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
Oscar Wilde
You are not here to verify,instruct yourself, or inform curiosityor carry report. You are here to kneelwhere prayer has been valid. And prayer is more than an order of words, the conscious occupation of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
T.S Eliot
The goodness you do when you are very happy is not as valuable as the goodness you do when you are very unhappy!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer
Alfred de Musset
For God must have more important universal matters to attend to than keeping himself busy with us, people! God is not interested in local matters!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Treat people as if they were what they should be and you help them become what they are capable of becoming.
Johann von Goethe
If you have a good light inside you, you will get a good light from outside!
Mehmet Murat ildan
There's a great spirit gone! Thus did I desire it.What our contempts doth often hurl from us,We wish it ours again. The present pleasure,By revolution lowering, does becomeThe opposite of itself. She's good, being gone.The hand could pluck her back that shoved her on.
William Shakespeare
Shrines! Shrines! Surely you don't believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof?
Aristophanes
Why are you all wasting human labour and the world’s wealth in building machinery to commit mass murder – creatures that for half a million years and more have been endowed with reason – conscious beings who discovered a better way long centuries ago?
Eden Phillpotts
Those——"—here he flung out a terrible oath—"those people don't know what their blind hands are sowing. They will know when our power is complete and we begin to mow down their cursed grass. They'll know it then!
Maxim Gorky
That such a slave as this should wear a sword,Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these,Like rats, oft bite the holy cords atwainWhich are too intrinse t' unloose; smooth every passionThat in the natures of their lords rebel,Being oil to the fire, snow to the colder moods,Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaksWith every gale and vary of their mastersKnowing naught, like dogs, but following.
William Shakespeare
There are still very few laws against thinking, although I am sure they're working hard on that in Washington.
Jeff Lindsay
Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.
William Shakespeare
When you're a kid you have these notions about how things are going to be.... You get a little older and you pull back on some of that. I think you wind up just tryin to minimize the pain.
Cormac McCarthy
When the sky is clear, when the sea is calm and the full moon is rising, whatever you are doing, leave it; go to the seaside; sit and watch it! You will then reach the land where there is no thinking; the land of pure wisdom!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Oh why rebuke you him that loves you so? / Lay breath so bitter on your bitter foe.
William Shakespeare
Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.
Seán O'Casey
What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.
George Bernard Shaw