Quotes by Playwrights - Page 88

For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of a man, even our anthropologists have realised that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.
Samuel Beckett
A critic is a legless man who teaches other people to run
Channing Pollock
Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them.
Cormac McCarthy
Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?
Graham Greene
There are times when a man's greatest need is to have someone to love, some focal point for his diffused emotions. Also there are times when the irritations, disappointments, and fears of life, restless as spermatozoids, must be released in hate.
Carson McCullers
All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players;They have their exits and their entrances,And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchelAnd shining morning face, creeping like snailUnwillingly to school. And then the lover,Sighing like furnace, with a woeful balladMade to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,Seeking the bubble reputationEven in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,In fair round belly with good capon lined,With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,Full of wise saws and modern instances;And so he plays his part. The sixth age shiftsInto the lean and slippered pantaloon,With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wideFor his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,Turning again toward childish treble, pipesAnd whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,That ends this strange eventful history,Is second childishness and mere oblivion,Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
William Shakespeare
If you are not afraid of the dark, the darkness will start being afraid of you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Man looks very coward and extremely primitive with an ostentatious big sword and he looks very brave and tremendously sophisticated with a humble olive branch!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Oh, and you must not forget the Kris Kringle. The child must believe in him until she reaches the age of six."" I KNOW there is not Santa Claus.""Yet you must teach the child that these things are so.""Why? When I, myself, do not believe?""Because...the child must have a valuable things which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which [to] live things that never were. It is necessary that she BELIEVE. She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.
Betty Smith
Tonight, history was going to be made. And it wasn't the discovery-of-radium, first-man-on-the-moon happy kind of history. It was the Spanish-Inquisition, here-comes-the-Hindenburg bad kind of history.
Eoin Colfer
There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age. I missed it coming and going.
J.B. Priestley
Summer's lease hath all too short a date.
William Shakespeare
Oh, you mysterious girls, when you are fifty-two we shall find you out; you must come into the open then. If the mouth has fallen sourly yours the blame: all the meanness your youth concealed have been gathering in your face. But the pretty thoughts and sweet ways and dear, forgotten kindnesses linger there also, to bloom in your twilight like evening primroses.
J.M. Barrie
Be as thou wast wont to be.See as thou wast wont to see.
William Shakespeare
An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.
Arthur Miller
Natürlich muss die Wahrheit im Kampf mit der Unwahrheit geschrieben werden und sie darf nicht etwas Allgemeines, Hohes, Vieldeutiges sein. Von dieser allgemeinen, hohen, vieldeutigen Art ist ja gerade die Unwahrheit. Wenn von einem gesagt wird, er hat die Wahrheit gesagt, so haben zunächst einige oder viele oder einer etwas anderes gesagt, eine Lüge oder etwas Allgemeines, aber er hat die Wahrheit gesagt, etwas Praktisches, Tatsächliches, Unleugbares, das, um was es sich handelte.
Bertolt Brecht
Wise man is a wing; stupid man is a hole! You meet a wise man, you rise, you meet a stupid man, and you fall!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Since when," he asked,"Are the first line and last line of any poemWhere the poem begins and ends?
Seamus Heaney
Now most people would put this doon tae experience, ye always want what ye cannae have and the things that ye dinnae really gie a toss aboot get handed tae ye oan a plate.
Irvine Welsh
Anything that ends is a dream. This whole universe is a dream.
Mehmet Murat ildan
Existence has billions of doors, but death has none!
Mehmet Murat ildan
And it started out fun. We were chattering enthusiastically, flipping between CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News. But as the evening wore on, and the numbers rolled in, it got quieter, and I found myself becoming intensely depressed. Why was I putting myself through this? The issues I’ve devoted my life to have become so marginalized by the coverage that they have no possible relevance to me. I can’t even blame the media — people simply don’t care about alternate-party politics. And why should they? I’m so far in the minority that my activism is a joke, a punchline that stopped being funny years ago. It goes beyond rooting for the underdog. It’s not rooting for the Giants: it’s more like, say, rooting for the Twins. But during the Super Bowl.
Phillip Andrew Bennett Low
The earth exists not for us but for itself; the Sun shines not for us, but for its own life!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does.
Cormac McCarthy
One more drink and I'll be under the host.
Mae West
emotion is first of all and in principle an accident
Jean-Paul Sartre
We are creatures taken seriously by the Earth, because we can severely affect the fate of the Earth, but we are in no way taken seriously by the Universe yet!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Nature and man are opposed in Spain.
Gertrude Stein
Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Because in some men, it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons - throw it to some human being or some human idea.
Carson McCullers
When you hurt some cunt […] it’s you duty to enjoy it, otherwise you’ve done it for fuck all, it means nothing
Irvine Welsh
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
Oscar Wilde
I am not a courageous person by nature. I have simply discovered that, at certain key moments in this life, you must find courage in yourself, in order to move forward and live. It is like a muscle and it must be exercised, first a little, and then more and more. All the really exciting things possible during the course of a lifetime require a little more courage than we currently have. A deep breath and a leap.
John Patrick Shanley
Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.
Seamus Heaney
World, they have taken the small children like butterflies and thrown them, beating their wings, into the fire--
Nelly Sachs
When we look at the old photographs, we always ask three main questions: Are they alive? If they are, where are they? And finally, what is their life story? Photography is an art of creating many questions in the mind of the viewer!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We will not know unless we begin.
Howard Zinn
Let those who sit know that this world is not a waiting room; it is an arena to struggle, an arena for action! Let the inactive remember that we were born to act, not to sit!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
George Bernard Shaw
If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Today every invention is received with a cry of triumph which soon turns into a cry of fear.
Bertolt Brecht
I thought that there could be no revolt against nature. I accepted the landscape without dreaming that, behind, there still prowled large skeletons without fur. With just one sign, I thought I was able to make them rise up outside their refuges...
Roger Vitrac
It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
Alan Bennett
The glories of our blood and stateAre shadows, not substantial things;There is no armor against Fate.Death lays his icy hand on kings...
James Shirley
This life is full of signs, many of which find their way to you exactly when you need them most.
Christy Hall
Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.
Oscar Wilde
His life was gentle and the elements So mixed in him that nature might stand up
William Shakespeare
There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind.
William Saroyan
But now, you are twain, you are cloven apartFlesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Where you see yourself is more important than where you actually are!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Between birth and death, neighbour, there is no business that is not risky; drinking water in a sitting position included! . . The gist of the matter is to do everything with fine tuning as an acrobat does when walking a tight rope, like a carpenter measuring everything meticulously!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Meditation is to leave the noise and to meet with the silence.
Mehmet Murat ildan
Utterly, irrevocably, lost
Oscar Wilde
A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.
Betty Smith
I'm fairly fond of boys, but my preference is for girls; When I have enough of a girl, she serves me still as a boy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When the wisdom speaks, be quite and listen! When the stupidity speaks, stand up and leave!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
J.M. Barrie
Closer, it’s all right. Touch the man of grief.Do. Don’t be afraid. My troubles are mine and I am the only man alive who can sustain them.
Sophocles
It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do. […] He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slopped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.
W Somerset Maugham
I happened to look up and there it was. All over and done with, at last. I sat on for a few moments with the ball in my hand and the dog yelping and pawing at me. (Pause.) Moments. Her moments, my moments (Pause.) The dog's moments.
Samuel Beckett