Quotes by Playwrights - Page 112

Behind your view there are other views; to see them, you must first visit the view you see!
Mehmet Murat ildan
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
Inaction is the worst action of human beings!
Mehmet Murat ildan
In action is the worst action of human beings!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Moreover I hate everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
And as always seems to happen when I have reached the point where I am ready to take decisive action, everything began to happen at once.
Jeff Lindsay
Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity
Thornton Wilder
To spend one's life being angry, and in the process doing nothing to change it, is to me ridiculous. I could be mad all day long, but if I'm not doing a damn thing, what difference does it make?
Charles Fuller
If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.
Damon Galgut
We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard
And so the result of several years of Everybody Shareskyism, other than slaughtering people, is for everybody to stand around and stare blankly at each other.
Lao She
Perhaps the god who had made the Cat People intended them as a joke. They had schools, but no education; politicians but no government; people, but no personal integrity; faces, but no concept of face. One had to admit that their god had gone a little too far with his little joke.
Lao She
And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand.
Oscar Wilde
At that moment a very good thing was happening to her. Four good things had happened to her, in fact, since she came to Misselthwaite Manor. She had felt as if she had understood a robin and that he had understood her; she had run in the wind until her blood had grown warm; she had been healthily hungry for the first time in her life; and she had found out what it was to be sorry for someone.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Alice More: As for understanding, I understand that you are the best man that I ever met, or am likely to; And, if you go...Well, God knows why I suppose. Though as God's my witness God's kept deadly quiet about it!
Robert Bolt
When they find what they don't like , they destroy it. Because it scares them-and you girls would scare them as much as anything they've ever seen.' 'Why?' asked Isobel. 'Because . . . because of what they believe.
Gordon Dahlquist
I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man.
Anton Chekhov
I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean — wherever my imagination ranges.
Anton Chekhov
It's a blindness thing, faith.
Niall Williams
How is it that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
I don't ask for your pity, but just for your understanding – not even that – no. Just for some recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.
Tennessee Williams
It is not easy in this world for one person to understand the next one.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
Euripides
No one dreamed them up. No one needed to. The vampire clawing at the window, the werewolf prowling the moor, the hags at the crossroads – they lurked here already. Some nightmares are ancient, as old as civilization. Some are older still.
Robert Dunbar
She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers
Graham Greene
God isn't here. God doesn't even know about this place
Johan Harstad
The mirror's light sparks in the eyes,And horrified, my lids drawn tight,I step back to that realm of nightWhere not a single exit lies...(Untitled: "I pass away this life of mine...")
Alexander Blok
Know your number. If you don’t know it you might forget who you are.
Diane Samuels
At some point, even the greatest misery begins to fade. Life, or what passes for life, plods on in it's own unending weary footsteps, and somehow we plod along with it, if we stay lucky.
Jeff Lindsay
Especially on rainy nights like this, they would congregate under the bridge, all the boys from nowhere, the boys who lived nowhere, who had nowhere else to go.
Robert Dunbar
Just as there are broken people, there are broken places on this earth. Some have always been broken. All cities have such neighborhoods at their edges, and this city is all edges … block after block of bleakly hopeless outskirts.People don’t bury dead cities. They abandon them. They abandon them to the poorest of the poor, to the lost and the doomed.
Robert Dunbar
They say a basis in fact underlies most legends. They say it all the time, all those Wise Elders in all those old horror films, the high priests, the scientists, the gypsy fortune tellers. On this single issue they agree unanimously.
Robert Dunbar
Cinema – all art really – has great power. Power to illuminate. Power to transform. For those of us who experience film as literature, classic movies comprised an introductory education in the genre. As kids, many of us went searching through library shelves for obscure source novels after seeing some old movie or other. It was the start of many an adventure.
Robert Dunbar
Sometimes sanity just means the ability to recognize the end of the road when you reach it.
Robert Dunbar
Darwin got it all wrong, you see. Fitness has nothing to do with it. It's survival of the sickest. That's all.
Philip Ridley
I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.
Susan Hill
Where got she her sullen mouthAnd where her swaying form?Would she live on eggs and applesWhen the blood of men is warm?(“The Young Witch”)
George Sterling
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
Within its gates I heard the soundOf winds in cypress caverns caughtOf huddling tress that moaned, and soughtTo whisper what their roots had found.(“A Dream of Fear”)
George Sterling
We ask only to be reassuredAbout the noises in the cellarAnd the window that should not have been open
T.S Eliot
His meals were always punctual. Whether she cooked well or badly he did not know; it was a matter of total indifference to him. During his meals, which he ate at his writing desk, he was busy with important considerations. As a rule he would not have been able to say what precisely he had in his mouth. He reserved consciousness for real thoughts; they depend upon it; without consciousness, thoughts are unthinkable. Chewing and digestion happen of themselves.
Elias Canetti
Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.
Oscar Wilde
You're lucky. I'm always conscious of myself —in my mind. Painfully conscious.
Jean-Paul Sartre
And perhaps there is none, no morrow anymore, for one who has waited so long for it in vain. And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks all look alike. Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fullness of the great deep and unchanging calm. But at long intervals they close, with the gentle suddenness of flesh that tightens, often without anger, and closes on itself.
Samuel Beckett
(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")
Maurice Maeterlinck
It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.
Cormac McCarthy
The problem with communication…is the illusion that is has been accomplished.
George Bernard Shaw
& love is an evil word. Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word.
Amiri Baraka
Man cannot spend all his time doing evil, and even in the company of pirates there must be some sweet moments on their sinister ship when you feel as if you were aboard a pleasure yacht.
Honoré de Balzac
The world turns and the world changes,But one thing does not change.In all of my years, one thing does not change,However you disguise it, this thing does not change:The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
T.S Eliot
Because evil, my dear child, can be done to anyone and by everyone, but good can only be done to those who need it.
Luigi Pirandello
You know what whore is. Next the devil adultery,Enters the devil murder.
John Webster
As in this world there are degrees of evils, So in this world there are degrees of devils.
John Webster
That same moment he ordered the hateful portrait taken out. But that did not calm his inner agitation: all his feelings and all his being were shaken to their depths, and he came to know that terrible torment which, by way of a striking exception, sometimes occurs in nature, when a weak talent strains to show itself on too grand a scale and fails; that torment which gives birth to great things in a youth, but, in passing beyond the border of dream, turns into a fruitless yearning; that dreadful torment which makes a man capable of terrible evildoing.
Nikolai Gogol
They caught up their horses and turned back. Nothing moved in that high wilderness save the wind. They did not speak. They were men of another time for all that they bore christian names and they had lived all their lives in a wilderness as had their fathers before them. They'd learnt war by warring, the generations driven from the eastern shore across a continent, from the ashes at Gnadenhutten onto the prairies and across the outlet to the bloodlands of the west. If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.
Cormac McCarthy
He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it was his experience that God could not be spoken for and that men with wicked histories often enjoyed lives of comfort and that they died in peace and were buried with honor. He said is was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation.
Cormac McCarthy
All concerns of men go wrong when they wish to cure evil with evil.
Sophocles
Evil gains work their punishment.
Sophocles
You spoke your words as though you denied the very existence of the shadows or of evil. Think, now: where would your good be if there were no evil and what would the world look like without shadow?
Mikhail Bulgakov