Quotes by Playwrights - Page 119

The themes that exercised the minds of survivor movements and their allies within the health and welfare professions generated a political project: how to revolutionise medical and judicial approaches to injured adults and children, how to raise awareness so that other people didn’t have to suffer the same, and how to understand, and then challenge, offenders who so love what they do to children that they can and must shut their minds to the feelings of children who have put their trust in them. P4
Beatrix Campbell
Another preoccupation fed into this dynamic relationship between discovery and denial: does sexual abuse actually matter? Should it, in fact, be allowed? After all, it was only in the 19070s that the Paedophile Information Exchange had argued for adults’ right to have sex with children – or rather by a slippery sleight of word, PIE inverted the imperative by arguing that children should have the right to have sex with adults. This group had been disbanded after the imprisonment of Tom O’Carroll, its leader, with some of its activists bunkered in Holland’s paedophile enclaves, only to re-appear over the parapets in the sex crime controversies of the 1990s. How recent it was, then, that paedophilia was fielded as one of the liberation movements, how many of those on the left and right of the political firmament, were – and still are – persuaded that sex with children is merely another case for individual freedom?Few people in Britain at the turn of the century publicly defend adults’ rights to sex with children. But some do, and they are to be found nesting in the coalition crusading against evidence of sexual suffering. They have learned from the 1970s, masked their intentions and diverted attention on to ‘the system’. Others may not have come out for paedophilia but they are apparently content to enter into political alliances with those who have. We believe that this makes their critique of survivors and their allies unreliable. Others genuinely believe in false memories, but may not be aware of the credentials of some of their advisors.
Beatrix Campbell
In this book we paint an unprecedented portrait of Britain’s first ‘false memory’ retraction and show that, like other ‘false memory’ cases which appeared in the public domain, memory itself was always a false trail – these women never forgot. We are not challenging people’s right to tell their own story and then to change it. But we do assert that the chance should be interpreted in the context that created it.Thousands of accounts of sexual and physical abuse in childhood cannot be explained by a pseudo-scientific ‘syndrome’. We have been shifted to the wrong debate, a debate about the malignancy of survivors and their allies, rather than those who have hurt them. That’s why the arguments have become so elusive. […]
Beatrix Campbell
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
The great strength she had used in the old days to conquer and subdue, to win her will and to defend her way, seemed now a power but to protect the suffering and uphold the weak, and this she did, not alone in hovels but in the brilliant court and world of fashion, for there she found suffering and weakness also, all the more bitter and sorrowful since it dared not cry aloud.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Much more likely you’ll hurt me. Still what does it matter? If I’ve got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The child will grow up and find out things for herself. She will know that I lied. She will be disappointed.""That is what is called learning the truth. It is a good thing to learn the truth one's self. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch. When as a woman life and people disappoint her, she will have had practice in disappointment and it will not come so hard. In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.
Betty Smith
But while they continued staring into one another’s face waiting for the miracle of science the pain grew worse.
Thornton Wilder
It is good thing to learn the truth one's self. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch. When as a woman life and people disappoint her, she will have had practice in disappointment and it will not come so hard. In teaching your child do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.
Betty Smith
She reminded him of (...) all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that never yet had provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenious and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy earth!
Joseph Heller
And yet it was not the mystery, but the comedy of suffering that struck him; its absolute uselessness, its grotesque want of meaning. How incoherent everything seemed! How lacking in all harmony! He was amazed at the discord between the shallow optimism of the day, and the real facts of existence. He was still very young.
Oscar Wilde
I must give due praise to the man who first extracted morphine from poppyheads. He was a true benefactor of mankind. The pain stopped seven minutes after the injection. Interesting: the pain passed over me in ceaseless waves, so that I had to gasp for breath, as though a red-hot crowbar were being thrust into my stomach and rotated. Four minutes after the injection I was able to distinguish the wave-like nature of the pain.
Mikhail Bulgakov
When I consider life, 't is all a cheat.Yet fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit;Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay.To-morrow 's falser than the former day;Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blestWith some new joys, cuts off what we possest.Strange cozenage! none would live past years again,Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;And from the dregs of life think to receiveWhat the first sprightly running could not give.
John Dryden
YOUNG WOMAN: Time is altered, the years to came are alteredYou know where you will find meI, fear, I, deathI, the memory beyond reachI, the recollection of the tenderness of your handsI, the sadness of our broken lifeI will defeat "it's not my concern" with my anguish
Griselda Gambaro
We have only to conquer Now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.Now is the triumph of the cross.
T.S Eliot
The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world... They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet... Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.
Oscar Wilde
And so beneath the weight lay IAnd suffered death, but could not die.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Unless you refuse the bad things happening to you, you will continue to suffer with your own consent!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It's necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it.
Natalie Clifford Barney
But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering ― curious as it may sound to you ― is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.
Oscar Wilde
Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
Honoré de Balzac
Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.
Graham Greene
Goodbye, Room." I wave up at Skylight. "Say goodbye," I tell Ma. "Goodbye, Room."Ma says it but on mute.I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the door.
Emma Donoghue
To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
Oscar Wilde
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
As long as one suffers one lives.
Graham Greene
How many stars can you count in the sky? How many mistakes can you count in your life? Stop counting! No clever man ever is stuck in the past!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Every lesson you take from your past immediately turns into a stairs to the light!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art.
Oscar Wilde
For most of the people there is no today and there is no tomorrow; for them, there is only the past times! Leave your past to live your today and to live your tomorrow!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You can’t clean your dirty past as if you are cleaning a dirty window! All you can do is to create a clean future!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence
T.S Eliot
In the days when wishing was having, I got what I wished and then I wish I hadn't.
Emma Donoghue
We make our own symbols, after the event has passed and begun to spoil.
Françoise Sagan
MOTHER TIME: The past is always with us, dear, for better or worse. It is what it is and you can't change it. All you can do is learn how to live with it in the present.
Hillary DePiano
Some things belong to the past.
Ronald Frame
There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past.
Dodie Smith
The past, rich with it's pains and joys, shuffles before me, relieving the weary dullness of endless days. I rejoice; I agonize.
Rukhsana Ahmad
Sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.
Rachel Joyce
If you are happy with your past, you visit it often; and strangely, if you are unhappy with your past, you visit it often too!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You can never really know where exactly people are looking at! At the place they are staring at? Or at their past? Or at their future?
Mehmet Murat ildan
Where are you? In the past or in the future? It doesn't matter because if you are not in today you are in the wrong place!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Past is always afraid of being forgotten because being forgotten means being never-existed in a way!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If you can be very impartial in analysing your own past, then you will have a much better future!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We are victims of our history and our present. They place too many obstacles in the way of love. And we cannot enjoy even our differences in peace.
Ama Ata Aidoo
In every man’s life there are moments where looking to the past may ruin the future and in those moments walking forward without looking back is the best thing one can ever do!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To positively discriminate in favour of groups that have been negatively discriminated against in the past.
Ben Elton
Do you know who your grand grand grand grand grand father is? Probably you don’t! If you want to know your very distant past, just look at yourself because you are the accumulated past, you are the ancient river coming from the valleys of the far past!
Mehmet Murat ildan
In the New Year, never forget to thank to your past years because they enabled you to reach today! Without the stairs of the past, you cannot arrive at the future!
Mehmet Murat ildan
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
Oscar Wilde
Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future
Maxim Gorky
What's done, is done
William Shakespeare
Things without all remedy should be without regard: what's done is done.
William Shakespeare
What's past is prologue.
William Shakespeare
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
Oscar Wilde
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
T.S Eliot
If we experience any failures or setbacks, we do not forget them because they offend our self-esteem. Instead we reflect on them deeply, trying to figure out what went wrong and discern whether there are any patterns to our mistakes.
Robert Greene
The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Because other people are not such wonderful people. They're one hundred times one thousand. You're one times one! They walk all over the earth. You just stay here.
Tennessee Williams
Be self-indulgent, and those who are also self-indulgent will like you. Tear your neighbor to pieces, and the other neighbors will laugh. But if you beat your soul, all souls will cry out.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Telling yourself you like the way you look is easy. Believing it is an entirely different kettle of whales.
Andrew Biss