Quotes by Playwrights - Page 80

Where there is an unknowable there is a promise.
Thornton Wilder
Life is doubt,And faith without doubt is nothing but death.
Miguel de Unamuno
I've never in my life had a problem giving another person what theywant. But no one's ever been able to do that for me. No one touches me,no one gets near me. But now you've touched me somewhere so fuckingdeep I can't believe and I can't be that for you. Because I can't find you.
Sarah Kane
All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children....
Robertson Davies
He rose and turned toward the lights of town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
Cormac McCarthy
Let me feel how thy pulses beat.
Thomas Middleton
If a quote changes your life in a good way, keep it in your mind and in your heart to give it to someone else too!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
William Shakespeare
Macbeth does murder sleep - the innocent sleep,Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast.
William Shakespeare
ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred with out a head
Euripides
For there was never yet philosopher That could endure the toothache patiently.
William Shakespeare
How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?
Oscar Wilde
...and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us; do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
William Shakespeare
Within this restless, hurried, modern worldWe took our hearts' full pleasure - You and I,And now the white sails of our ship are furled,And spent the lading of our argosy.Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,For very weeping is my gladness fled,Sorrow has paled my young mouth's vermilion,And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.But all this crowded life has been to theeNo more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spellOf viols, or the music of the seaThat sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.
Oscar Wilde
Power consists in making oneself the goal of another person's social instincts, without seeking to satisfy one's own social instincts through him. The other then does everything one asks. Powerlessness consists in wanting or having to satisfy one's social instincts through another person whose social instincts one has not succeeded in concentrating on oneself - one then does everything the other asks.
Esther Vilar
Pull yourself out of yourself so that you can replace yourself with the universe itself! When somebody knocks your door, if you are not there, the universe will open the door! Wisdom is to make yourself to fly away from yourself! When you leave yourself, there won’t be any emptiness left inside you, because universe will immediately flow into that emptiness!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men and people in general.
Lorraine Hansberry
Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.
Graham Greene
Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of himself which is lost forever, it is heart-rending to think how great are the chances that it will be disregarded.
W Somerset Maugham
My heart is warm with the friends I make And better friends I'll not be knowing Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take No matter where it's going.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
A life without goal is a ship without rudder!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You didn't succeed. Well, what of that? There's nothing to prove, you know, and the revolution's not a question of virtue but of effectiveness. There is no heaven. There's work to be done, that's all. And you must do what you're cut out for; all the better if it comes easy to you. The best work is not the work that takes the most sacrifice. It's the work in which you can best succeed.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.
Jean Anouilh
Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way., Nov. 20, 2009]
Cormac McCarthy
There's my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don't say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.
Samuel Beckett
Some folks rail against other folks, because other folks have what some folks would be glad of.
Henry Fielding
Today will die tomorrow.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Love is the poetry of the senses!
Honoré de Balzac
I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.
Oliver Goldsmith
Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is.
Arnold Bennett
Look at the sun! It’s dry, it’s dead, it needs a drink, it wants blood! And I’ll give it blood!
Alfred de Musset
Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lustLike diamonds we are cut with our own dust
John Webster
It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it.
Tennessee Williams
Uncertainty is the normal state.
Tom Stoppard
He who has lived and thought can't helpdespising people in his soul;him who has felt disturbs the ghost of irrecoverable days;for him there are no more enchantments;him does the snake of memories,him does repentance bite.
Alexander Pushkin
Nothing in life was as ugly as death.
Graham Greene
Time and the bell have buried the day,The black cloud carries the sun away.Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematisStray down, bend to us; tendril and sprayClutch and cling? ChillFingers of yew be curledDown on us? After the kingfisher's wingHas answered light to light, and is silent, the light is stillAt the still point of the turning world.
T.S Eliot
Suppression or Invalidation of any innate expression of who or what I am is a crime against myself.
Jean-Jacques Dalpe
What matters creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I steal a glance when no one is looking. Especially at his neck, when he turns to say something to my mother. That slender neck, with its air of determination, brisk and bold…
Anne Hébert
If an earth with no other creatures but only humans would be possible, it would be unbearably boring!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.
Stefan Zweig
Do not forget, some give little, and it is much for them, others give all, and it costs them no effort; who then has given most?
Knut Hamsun
Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth...
Sinclair Lewis
It is always easy to create an ordinary city; what is difficult is to create an extraordinary one, peaceful and restful one, smart and tidy, artful and cultivated one, in short, a livable one! And Zurich is such a city!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You can stay here with your papa and die or you can go with me.... You'll be all right.
Cormac McCarthy
Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
W Somerset Maugham
If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.
Tom Stoppard
...so Leola thought that a modest romance with a hero in embryo could do no harm - might even be a patriotic duty.
Robertson Davies
Me," Artemis blurted. "I'm the nut."Artemis could have sworn the squid winked at him before bringing the five-ton chunk of spacecraft swinging down toward the morsel of meat in its blue shell."I'm the nut!" Artemis shouted again, a little hysterically, it must be said.
Eoin Colfer
As you near a finish line, do not slow down. Instead, run faster. Give all you have left until it is done. It is then that you may collapse.
Christy Hall
If you go to heaven without being naturally qualified for it you will not enjoy it there.
George Bernard Shaw
It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!
Jean-Paul Sartre
-The little comfort of love?-Is that comfort so little?-Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for.
Tennessee Williams
The blossoms seem unusually lovely this year. There were none of the scarlet-and-white-striped curtains that are set up among the blossoming trees so invariably that one has to come to think of them as the attire of cherry blossoms; there were no bustling tea-stalls, no holiday crowds of flower-viewers, no one hawking balloons and toy windmills; instead there were only the cherry trees blossoming undisturbed among the evergreens, making one feel as though he were seeing the naked bodies of the blossoms. Nature's free bounty and useless extravagance had never appeared so fantastically beautiful as it did this spring. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that Nature had come to reconquer the earth for herself.
Yukio Mishima
They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.
Susan Hill
I take the words I can get and try to occupy them. Using the idea that my grandfather gave me — “If you say a word often enough it becomes you” — I borrow people for a moment, by borrowing their words. I borrow them for a moment to understand something about them, and to understand something about us. By “us,” I mean humans.
Anne Deavere Smith
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
Robertson Davies
She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Now, paper and pencils," said Miss Marcy, clapping her hands.Writing paper is scarce in this house, and I had no intention of tearing sheets out of this exercise book, which is a superb sixpenny one the Vicar gave me. In the end, Miss Marcy took the middle pages out of her library record, which gave us a pleasant feeling that we were stealing from the government, and then we sat round the table and elected her chairman.
Dodie Smith