Quotes by Playwrights - Page 118

A natural response when people feel overwhelmed is to retreat into various forms of passivity. If we don’t try too much in life, if we limit our circle of action, we can give ourselves the illusion of control. The less we attempt, the less chances of failure. If we can make it look like we are not really responsible for our fate, for what happens to us in life, then our apparent powerlessness is more palatable.
Robert Greene
And as we should all know by now, anytime you predict failure you have an excellent chance of being right.
Jeff Lindsay
A worthy failure is more valuable than a mediocre success.
Kuo Pao Kun
Failure knocks the door of the unprepared minds very often.
Mehmet Murat ildan
Sometimes coping with the difficulties success brings is much more difficult than coping with the difficulties failure brings!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A man who is fed up with being successful all the time must definitely try failure to feel better!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Still, failure, success, what is it? Whae gies a fuck. We aw live, then we die, in quite a short space ay time n аw. That's it; end ay fuckin story.
Irvine Welsh
Failure is only the name that we give to our mistakes."-Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
The greatness of the enterprise does not always ensure success, but at least ensures glory.
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
. . . failure is also the stern parent of truth. (p525)
Franz Werfel
What we call as burden of life is nothing but the human failure on the matter of creating a just world!
Mehmet Murat ildan
She had been unable to stand the people at the inn. The company had disgusted her. For an instant, but that instant was now long gone, she had thought of returning to her home, to Persia. Or to Greece, where she had friends, but she had dropped the ideaagain. From me she had expected salvation, but I too had disappointed her. I was, much as she was, a lost and ultimately ruinous person, even though I did not admit that to her, she could feel it, she knew it. No salvation could come from such a person. On the contrary, such a person only pushed one even deeper into despair and hopelessness. Schumann, Schopenhauer, these were the two words she said after a prolonged silence and I had the impression that she was smiling as she said them, and then nothing again for a long time. She had had everything, heard and seen everything, that was enough. She did not wish to hear from anyone any more. People were utterly distasteful to her, the whole of human society had profoundly disappointed her and abandoned her in her disappointment. There would have been no point in saying anything, and so I just listened and said nothing. I had, she said, on our second walk in the larch-wood, been the first person to explain to her the concept of anarchy in such a clear and decisive manner. Anarchy she said and no more, after that she was again silent. An anarchist, I had said to her in the larch-wood, was only a person who practised anarchy, she now reminded me. Everything in an intellectual mind is anarchy, she said, repeating another of my quotations. Society, no matter what society, must always be turned upside down and abolished, she said, and what she said were again my words. Everything that is is a lot more terrible and horrible than described by you, she said. You were right, she said, these people here are malicious and violent and this country is a dangerous and an inhuman country. You are lost, she said, just as I am lost. You may escape to wherever you choose. Your science is an absurd science, as is every science. Can you hear yourself? she asked. All these things you yourself said. Schumann and Schopenhauer, they no longer give you anything, you have got to admit it. Whatever you have done in your life, which you are always so fond of describing asexistence, you have, naturally enough, failed. You are an absurd person. I listened to her for a while, then I could bear it no longer and took my leave.
Thomas Bernhard
If you fail, let the world knows the reasons of your failure; if you win, let the world knows the secrets of your victory! This is a great way to be useful for others!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Believe me, Michael:Those who flee from the past will always lose the race.I know this from experience. When you reach your goal,Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,You will find your past failures waiting there to greet you.
T.S Eliot
When you start your journey towards your target, walk and then rest for a while and then walk again and then rest for a while again and then walk again! Rule out the option of failure in your mind! Leave only one option available: To reach your target!
Mehmet Murat ildan
...I am better Thoughtful Prince than King. Potential holds appeal since in its castle wallsOne is protected from the awful shameOf failure.
Mike Bartlett
If giving up is to fail, then to hell with give up!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.—Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (1983)
Samuel Beckett
We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought.
Thomas Bernhard
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
I dont believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamour and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldnt live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love. Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. All with a single conclusion. For you and for every one and every thing that you have chosen to care for. There's the true brotherhood. The true fellowship. And everyone is a member for life. You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes, I do. And what I see sickens me. Do you understand me? Can you understand me?
Cormac McCarthy
I'm just not having a very good time and I don't have any reason to think it'll get anything but worse. I'm tired. I'm hurt. I'm sad. I feel used.
Marsha Norman
Mama, I know you used to ride the bus. Riding the bus and it’s hot and bumpy and crowded and too noisy and more than anything in the world you want to get off and the only reason in the world you don’t get off is it’s still fifty blocks from where you’re going? Well, I can get off right now if I want to, because even if I ride fifty more years and get off then, it’s the same place when I step down to it. Whenever I feel like it, I can get off. As soon as I’ve had enough, it’s my stop. I’ve had enough.
Marsha Norman
No. You can't. And I can't do anything either, about my life, to change it, make it better, make me feel better about it. Like it better, make it work. But I can stop it. Shut it down, turn it off like the radio when there's nothing on I want to listen to. It's all I really have that belongs to me and I'm going to say what happens to it. And it's going to stop. And I'm going to stop it. So. Let's just have a good time.
Marsha Norman
Bear no malice for the ones who leave you.
Bert V. Royal
And then again, maybe it was some weird noise in my brother’s head, some little digital murmur he never told anyone about. I’ve heard about that – how you wake up one day and there’s like this permanent dial tone droning somewhere behind the meat in your head, a little Dustbuster trapped where the brain saves you from going crazy. After a while you wind up ending it all just to make things quiet again.
Adam Rapp
I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.
Antonin Artaud
Why bother inflicting enormous pain on yourself when sooner or later Life would certainly get around to doing it for you?
Jeff Lindsay
You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!
Tennessee Williams
When I arrived at the house in the suburbs that night I seriously contemplated suicide for the first time in my life. But as I thought about it, the idea became exceedingly tiresome, and I finally decided it would be a ludicrous business. I had an inherent dislike of admitting defeat. Moreover, I told myself, there's no need for me to take such decisive action myself, not when I'm surrounded by such a bountiful harvest of death—death in an air raid, death at one's post of duty, death in the military service, death on the battlefield, death from being run over, death from disease—surely my name has already been entered in the list for one of these: a criminal who has been sentenced to death does not commit suicide. No—no matter how I considered, the season was not auspicious for suicide. Instead I was waiting for something to do me the favor of killing me. And this, in the final analysis, is the same as to say that I was waiting for something to do me the favor of keeping me alive.
Yukio Mishima
JASON: 'Intended wings.' How depressing.MICHAEL: Yes. Makes them into suicides, really, the pigeons.JASON: No - no, it doesn't. It could mean the wings were 'intended' to carry them upwards, out of the darkness, but they were defective in some way, these wings, so the pigeons aren't suicidal, not at all, just badly equipped for flying. Like the rest of us.
Simon Gray
All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.
Thomas Bernhard
…Her desire was close to that of the person who drowns himself; he does not necessarily covet death so much as what comes after the drowning—something different from what he had before, at least a different world.
Yukio Mishima
I would like to write a suicide note in three and a halflanguagesand travel south on a Thursday towardssome form of life outside of earth
Eric Gamalinda
It was as though his son cheated him by depriving him of his beloved presence, the sweet and treacherous thief had plundered his heart. If Johnny had died in any other way, cancer or leukaemia… he could have grieved with a clear heart, cried also. But suicide seemed a deliberate act of spite which the Judge resented.
Carson McCullers
Lucien took the cigar and lit it, in the Spanish fashion, from that of the priest. "He is right," Lucien thought; "there is plenty of time to kill myself.
Honoré de Balzac
What point is there in dying in a ward, listening to the moans and rasps of the terminally ill? Wouldn't it be better to spend the twenty-seven thousand on a banquet, then, after taking poison, depart for the other world to the sound of violins, surrounded by intoxicated beautiful women and dashing friends?
Mikhail Bulgakov
Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed. His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!
William Shakespeare
HELENA. What a fine day! Not too hot. [A pause.]VOITSKI. A fine day to hang oneself.
Anton Chekhov
I think she was too tired to play anymore, she was in a hurry to get to Heaven so she didn't wait, why didn't she wait for me?
Emma Donoghue
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself, but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.
Antonin Artaud
The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.
Yukio Mishima
(Looking at the tree) Pity we haven't got a bit of rope.
Samuel Beckett
When he endures nothing but endless miseries-- What pleasure is there in living the day after day, Edging slowly back and forth toward death?Anyone who warms their heart with the glow Of flickering hope is worth nothing at all. The noble man should either live with honor or die with honor. That's all there is to be said.
Sophocles
There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.
Tennessee Williams
Some party hack decreed that the peoplehad lost the government's confidenceand could only regain it with redoubled effort.If that is the case, would it not be be simpler,If the government simply dissolved the peopleAnd elected another?
Bertolt Brecht
I feel it's all wrong to be nervous," said Maria. "I feel it's lack of confidence. One ought to go right ahead, never minding.""Some people do," he said, "but they're the duds. They are the ones that win prizes at school, and you never hear of them again. Go on. Be nervous. Be ill. Be sick down the lavatory pan. It's part of your life from now on. You've got to go through with it. Nothing's worth while if you don't fight for it first, if you haven't a pain in your belly beforehand.
Daphne du Maurier
Alas, my lord, your wisdom is consumed in confidence.
William Shakespeare
He who closes his ears to the views of others shows little confidence in the integrity of his own views.
William Congreve
Philip looked at his own work. How could you tell whether there was anything in it or whether you were wasting your time? It was clear that the will to achieve could not help you and confidence in yourself meantnothing.
W Somerset Maugham
To country people Cows are mild,And flee from any stick they throw;But I’m a timid town bred child,And all the cattle seem to know.
T.S Eliot
If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together... there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart... I'll always be with you.
A.A. Milne
You see, the point is that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.
Henrik Ibsen
Without your wound where would your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.
Thorton Wilder
You are certainly unique. Everyone is unique. Nobody has ever suffered quite like you before because nobody has ever been you before.
Robertson Davies
Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas
Langston Hughes
It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.
Oscar Wilde
... one fire burns out another’s burning.One pain is lessened by another’s anguish. -Romeo & Juliet
William Shakespeare
The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation.
Tennessee Williams
(Talking about the movement to deny the prevalence and effects of adult sexual exploitation of children)So what does this movement consist of? Who are the movers and shakers? Well molesters are in it, of course. There are web pages telling them how to defend themselves against accusations, to retain confidence about their ‘loving and natural’ feelings for children, with advice on what lawyers to approach, how to complain, how to harass those helping their children. Then there’s the Men’s Movements, their web pages throbbing with excitement if they find ‘proof’ of conspiracy between feminists, divorcing wives and therapists to victimise men, fathers and husbands.Then there are journalists. A few have been vitally important in the US and Britain in establishing the fightback, using their power and influence to distort the work of child protection professionals and campaign against children’s testimony. Then there are other journalists who dance in and out of the debates waggling their columns behind them, rarely observing basic journalistic manners, but who use this debate to service something else – a crack at the welfare state, standards, feminism, ‘touchy, feely, post-Diana victimhood’. Then there is the academic voice, landing in the middle of court cases or inquiries, offering ‘rational authority’. Then there is the government. During the entire period of discovery and denial, not one Cabinet minister made a statement about the prevalence of sexual abuse or the harm it caused.Finally there are the ‘retractors’. For this movement to take off, it had to have ‘human interest’ victims – the accused – and then a happy ending – the ‘retractors’. We are aware that those ‘retractors’ whose parents trail them to newspapers, television studios and conferences are struggling. Lest we forget, they recanted under palpable pressure.
Beatrix Campbell