Quotes by Playwrights - Page 120

But now that she had achieved knighthood, and thought and acted as she wanted and decided, for one has to act in this way in order to save this world, she neither noticed nor cared that all the people around her thought she was insane.
Kathy Acker
Suddenly she bent down and kissed his fingers and went quickly away. But he sat for a long time in the gathering clouds trembling with happiness and trying to penetrate into the meaning of these things.
Thorton Wilder
I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot.
Eugène Ionesco
We can't stop reading. Compulsively we find ourselves reading significance into dreams (we construct a science upon it); into tea-leaves and the fall of cards. We look up at the shifting vapours in the sky, and see faces, lost cities, defeated armies. Isolated in the dark, with nothing to hear and no surfaces to touch, we hallucinate reading-matter. Our craving becomes generalized – for 'the meaning of life'. If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place the individual grains of sand in a moral or aesthetic hierarchy. We should long to find the greatest grain of sand in the world, and even (in order to find a fixed point of orientation in time as well as in space) the all-time greatest grain of sand; the grain of sand whose discovery changed our whole understanding of grains of sand for ever.
Michael Frayn
MASHA: Isn’t there some meaning?TOOZENBACH: Meaning? … Look out there, it’s snowing. What’s the meaning of that?
Anton Chekhov
The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse.
Jean-Paul Sartre
But a generation that does not aspire to seriousness, to meaning, is unworthy to walk in the shadow of those who have gone before, I mean those who have struggled and surmounted, I mean those who have aspired, I mean Rembrandt, I mean Turner, I mean Michelangelo and Matisse … I mean obviously Rothko.
John Logan
What did it all mean? He thought of his own life, the high hopes with which he had entered upon it, the limitations which his body forced upon him, his friendlessness, and the lack of affection which had surrounded his youth. He did not know that he had ever done anything but what seemed best to do, and what a cropper he had come! Other men, with no more advantages than he, succeeded, and others again, with many more, failed. It seemed pure chance. The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
W Somerset Maugham
And if ever I'm reduced to looking for a meaning to my life, you never can tell, it's in that old mess I'll stick my nose to begin with, the mess of that poor old uniparous whore and myself the last of my foul brood, neither man nor beast.
Samuel Beckett
The parts of our lives when we write them down seem to belong in different books, by different writers even. What all these bits and pieces make up I don't know. There is no plot. Perhaps meaning is something we invent afterward, putting it all together, like imagined God.
Niall Williams
The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water.
W Somerset Maugham
We had the experience but missed the meaning.
T.S Eliot
Each man is the bard of his own existence. This is how he is joined to the world.
Cormac McCarthy
If you cannot create a meaning, the things you see will always look meaningless to you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What's in a name?
William Shakespeare
For a finite being, an infinite path has no meaning!
Mehmet Murat ildan
[I]f you set out to mention everything you would never be done, and that's what counts, to be done, to have done. Oh, I know, even when you mention only a few of the things there are you do not get done either, I know, I know. But it's a change of muck. And if all muck is the same muck that doesn't matter, it's good to have a change of muck, to move from one heap to another, from time to time, fluttering you might say, like a butterfly, as if you were ephemeral.
Samuel Beckett
Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.
Cormac McCarthy
Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?
Oscar Wilde
We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Every angel is terrifying.Through the darkness, they move silently...I will go down into death with you.I must go where I must goTo see what I must seeIn that place where no one knows...... This is where love is taking me.You have been leadingMe, angels, in and out of death.I have no idea who you are.Eurydice. Is she nothingOr is she your mirror?I don't know anymore.I am at war.Perhaps that which is given - Being human - Is too hard,And so it is love that brings us,To what cannot be born,To ourselves,And so we must change,Must descend, guided by love, into the unknown.Lovers disappear in each other.Do they disappear forever?Where do they go?
Kathy Acker
Because the fact of not being understood by other people had become my only real source of pride, I was never confronted by any impulse to express things and to make others understand something that I knew.
Yukio Mishima
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth
Oscar Wilde
The best thinking says 'the self' is a fiction (I have a piece about that), yet it's a fiction that we all believe, our most intimate experience. Maybe it's nothing more than our tendency to repeat. Maybe we repeat because when we do, we recognize the behavior and the familiarity is comforting. So the self is just the consolation of our tendencies.
Richard Greenberg
I lived willy-nilly. Without any sense of being part of the order of things. I lived by fragments, pieces, scraps, in the moment, at random, from incident to incident, as if buffeted by ebb and flow. Oftentimes I had the impression that someone had torn the majority of pages out of the book of my life, because they were empty, or because they belonged not to me but to someone else’s life.
Wiesław Myśliwski
Enlightenment is to replace your own self with the self of the universe!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.
Oscar Wilde
I don't believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.
Graham Greene
Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.)
Samuel Beckett
The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness around me I feel less alone. (Pause.) In a way. (Pause.) I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to... (hesitates) ...me. (Pause.)
Samuel Beckett
I myself am an absolute abyss.
Antonin Artaud
Fashion is the science of appearance, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
Henry Fielding
In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.
Oscar Wilde
It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures.
Robert Greene
MOTHER TIME: We all get the exact same 365 days. The only difference is what we do with them.
Hillary DePiano
MOTHER TIME: Every New Year is the same. Every day, every second is too for that matter. But when we deliver them in secret, when another year just begins as a matter of fact, it's easy to fail to appreciate what a miracle it is to have more time. So, I suppose, it feels different right now because this time you're paying attention
Hillary DePiano
MURRY: Resolutions are a complete waste of time. They're just this meaningless ritual, empty promises we make and break within hours of each other.
Hillary DePiano
MURRY: Why do we even celebrate the New Year? It's just this arbitrary quirk of how we measure time in years, right? Midnight tonight is the very same transition from day to day that we do every 24 hours. But this thing in my hands, it feels real in a way the numbered calendar box never does. Why? What makes midnight tonight any different?
Hillary DePiano
MURRY: It's not that, it's just… I don't really get it. I usually find myself staring at the midnight deadline filled with regrets both for opportunities and loved ones missed. It's another day closer to the end. The last thing I feel like doing is counting down to some wild celebration. It just seems so sad to say goodbye to a year and know that it’s gone forever and you can’t go back to it. Not to relive, not to correct.NOEL: I've never thought about it that way.MURRY: There's something so final about it. It's the period at the end of the sentence.NOEL: The New Year's resolution.
Hillary DePiano
NOEL: And even when I don't stay up until midnight, I still enjoy the tradition of New Year's resolutions. What can I say? I like setting personal goals and challenging myself to improve. I suppose I could do it on any day of the year, but the New Year is as good a day as any. It's a fresh start.
Hillary DePiano
My dear fellow, it isn't easy to be anything nowadays. There's such a lot of beastly competition about.
Oscar Wilde
Life is a miracle and your most important goal in life is to protect this miracle. You have one more goal which is as important as this one and that is to protect the other miracles, the lives of others!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Your first purpose is to find a purpose for yourself. And your second purpose must not immediately be trying to reach that purpose you found but to investigate thoroughly whether that purpose is really necessary for yourself or whether it is worth at all to struggle for it! Because millions are fighting for a purpose which will in no way make them happy at the end!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.
Oscar Wilde
I come in a world of iron...to make a world of gold
Dale Wasserman
Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge. But there is another element, an X factor that Masters inevitably possess, that seems mystical but that is accessible to us all. Whatever field of activity we are involved in, there is generally an accepted path to the top. It is a path that others followed, and because we are conformist creatures, most of us opt for this conventional route. But Masters have a strong inner guiding system and a high level of self-awareness. What has suited others in the past does not suit them, and they know that trying to fit into a conventional mold would only lead to a dampening of spirit, the reality they seek eluding them. And so inevitably, these Masters, as they progress on their career paths, make a choice at a key moment in their lives: they decide to forge their own route, one that others will see as unconventional, but that suits their own spirit and rhythms and leads them closer to discovering the hidden truths of their objects of study. This key choice takes self-confidence and self-awarenes–the X factor that is necessary for attaining mastery...
Robert Greene
For us, a pretty bird is a pretty bird; for an insect, pretty bird is an ugly enemy!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It is not enough that your designs, nay that your actions, are intrinsically good, you must take care they shall appear so.
Henry Fielding
plantitIt will sproutBut forget about the rustic festivitiesFor the explosive word falls harmlessly eternal throughthe compact generations
Jean Cocteau
Nobody adores fertilizer. Nobody devotes their life to fertilizer (unless they own a fertilizer company). But, shit, you need it to grow the crops. The land is arid and dry without it, and trying to grow things is likely to be futile.
Shellen Lubin
Sometimes caring for something already growing is more perilous than planting something new.
Rachel Joyce
I am not gamesome: I do lack some partof that quick spirit that is in Antony.
William Shakespeare
For a cheerful spirit, a dark street is just another bright street!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The Indians were inside their bodies, he decided, in a way that the British were not. His own flesh impeded his spirit.
Damon Galgut
Well, I must do’t. Away, my disposition, and possess me Some harlot’s spirit! My throat of war be turn’d, Which quier’d with my drum, into a pipe Small as an eunuch, or the virgin voice That babies lull asleep! The smiles of knaves Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys’ tears take up The glasses of my sight! A beggar’s tongue Make motion through my lips, and my arm’d knees, Who bow’d but in my stirrup, bend like his That hath receiv’d an alms! I will not do’t, Lest I surcease to honor mine own truth, And by my body’s action teach my mind A most inherent baseness.
William Shakespeare
It is not possible for a house to own a spirit without owning windows with flowers!
Mehmet Murat ildan
How now, spirit, whither wander you?
William Shakespeare
People up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.
Langston Hughes
The spirit gone, man is garbage.
Joseph Heller