Quotes by Playwrights - Page 128

Let us not burthen our remembrance withA heaviness that's gone.
William Shakespeare
People felt themselves watching him even before they knew that there was anything different about him. His eyes made a person think that he heard things that no one else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human.
Carson McCullers
...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)
Barbara Blatner
blue-gold sky, fresh cloud, emerald-black mountain, trees on rocky ledges, on the summit, the tiny pin of a telephone tower-all brilliantly clear, in shadow and out. and on and through everything everywhere the sun shines without reservation (p. 97)
Barbara Blatner
Is there no pity sitting in the clouds that sees into the bottom of my grief?
William Shakespeare
The grief that does not speak whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break.
William Shakespeare
I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)
Barbara Blatner
oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)
Barbara Blatner
Well, every one can master a grief but he that has it.
William Shakespeare
In the monotony of everyday existence grief comes as a holiday, and a fire is an entertainment. A scratch embellishes an empty face.
Maxim Gorky
Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.
Cormac McCarthy
Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows, which shows like grief itself, but is not so; or sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears, divides one thing entire to many objects: like perspectives which, rightly gaz'd upon, show nothing but confusion:
William Shakespeare
It's always fallen to women to forge the peace between all these hot-blooded men, always ready to go to war at the slightest provocation....Why do men behave the way they do, warring?""What do you think?" he asked."Maybe because they've got no sense of grief?
Nuruddin Farah
Thus heaven's gift to us is this: That habit takes the place of bliss.
Alexander Pushkin
I will not speak falsely and say to you: 'Do not grieve for me when I go.' I have loved my children and tried to be a good mother and it is right that my children grieve for me. But let your grief be gentle and brief. And let resignation creep into it. Know that I shall be happy. I shall see face to face the great saints I have loved all my life.
Betty Smith
Did you really cease to love a person because you had been treated cruelly?
W Somerset Maugham
Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!
William Shakespeare
Do not forever with thy vailed lidsSeek for thy noble father in the dust.Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die,Passing though nature to eternity.
William Shakespeare
Most people are ennobled by the actual presence of death. But how long do you suppose this nobility will last in him?
Henrik Ibsen
We will talk of this again, when the grass has first withered on her grave. Then you'll hear him spouting about "the child too early torn from her father's heart;" then you'll see him steep himself in a syrup of sentiment and self-admiration and self-pity. Just you wait!
Henrik Ibsen
My particular grief Is of so flood-gate and o'erbearing nature That it engluts and swallows other sorrows, And it is still itself.
William Shakespeare
My soule, poore soule thou talkes of things/ Thou knowest not what, my soule hath sliver wings,/ That mounts me up unto the highest heavens.
Thomas Kyd
-(I)n memory, remorse wraps the self.
Claudia Rankine
for my grief's so greatThat no supporter but the huge firm earthCan hold it up: here I and sorrows sit;Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.(Constance, from King John, Act III, scene 1)
William Shakespeare
She did not know it, but she was actually in despair at the poverty of human emotions. Was it not irrational that there was nothing to do except weep when ten people died, just as one wept for but a single person?
Yukio Mishima
Have I thought long to see this morning’s face,And doth it give me such a sight as this?
William Shakespeare
Which would you choose if you could:pleasure for yourself despite your friendsor a share in their grief?
Sophocles
She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.
Fay Weldon
Mrs. Sussex said Byron’s loss would grow more bearable. But here was the nub: he didn’t want to lose his loss. Loss was all he had left of his mother. If time healed the gap, it would be as if she’d never been there.
Rachel Joyce
The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.
Cormac McCarthy
When Rosencrantz asks Hamlet, "Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your grief to your friends"(III, ii, 844-846), Hamlet responds, "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me." (III,ii, 371-380)
William Shakespeare
Some grief shows much of love,But much of grief shows still some want of wit.
William Shakespeare
I loathe a friend whose gratitude grows old, a friend who takes his friend's prosperity but will not voyage with him in his grief
Euripides
Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.
Sophocles
Seems," madam? Nay, it is; I know not "seems."'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly: these indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play: But I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
William Shakespeare
Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.
William Shakespeare
I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It's like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there and keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk round it.
Rachel Joyce
And when I look around the apartment where I now am,—when I see Charlotte’s apparel lying before me, and Albert’s writings, and all those articles of furniture which are so familiar to me, even to the very inkstand which I am using,—when I think what I am to this family—everything. My friends esteem me; I often contribute to their happiness, and my heart seems as if it could not beat without them; and yet—if I were to die, if I were to be summoned from the midst of this circle, would they feel—or how long would they feel—the void which my loss would make in their existence? How long! Yes, such is the frailty of man, that even there, where he has the greatest consciousness of his own being, where he makes the strongest and most forcible impression, even in the memory, in the heart of his beloved, there also he must perish,—vanish,—and that quickly.I could tear open my bosom with vexation to think how little we are capable of influencing the feelings of each other. No one can communicate to me those sensations of love, joy, rapture, and delight which I do not naturally possess; and though my heart may glow with the most lively affection, I cannot make the happiness of one in whom the same warmth is not inherent.Sometimes I don’t understand how another can love her, is allowed to love her, since I love her so completely myself, so intensely, so fully, grasp nothing, know nothing, have nothing but her!I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all. I possess so much, but without her I have nothing.One hundred times have I been on the point of embracing her. Heavens! what a torment it is to see so much loveliness passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold of it! And laying hold is the most natural of human instincts. Do not children touch everything they see? And I!Witness, Heaven, how often I lie down in my bed with a wish, and even a hope, that I may never awaken again! And in the morning, when I open my eyes, I behold the sun once more, and am wretched. If I were whimsical, I might blame the weather, or an acquaintance, or some personal disappointment, for my discontented mind; and then this insupportable load of trouble would not rest entirely upon myself. But, alas! I feel it too sadly; I am alone the cause of my own woe, am I not? Truly, my own bosom contains the source of all my pleasure. Am I not the same being who once enjoyed an excess of happiness, who at every step saw paradise open before him, and whose heart was ever expanded towards the whole world? And this heart is now dead; no sentiment can revive it. My eyes are dry; and my senses, no more refreshed by the influence of soft tears, wither and consume my brain. I suffer much, for I have lost the only charm of life: that active, sacred power which created worlds around me,—it is no more. When I look from my window at the distant hills, and behold the morning sun breaking through the mists, and illuminating the country around, which is still wrapped in silence, whilst the soft stream winds gently through the willows, which have shed their leaves; when glorious Nature displays all her beauties before me, and her wondrous prospects are ineffectual to extract one tear of joy from my withered heart,—I feel that in such a moment I stand like a reprobate before heaven, hardened, insensible, and unmoved. Oftentimes do I then bend my knee to the earth, and implore God for the blessing of tears, as the desponding labourer in some scorching climate prays for the dews of heaven to moisten his parched corn.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Jo claimed that the reason people survived breakups was that within days of the amputation, Mother Nature started reminding you of what you had been doing without, what could have been better, all the samll discontents you had been filing away.
Emma Donoghue
And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.
Emma Donoghue
To weep is to make less the depth of grief.
William Shakespeare
...real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.
Emma Donoghue
It was the word 'late' that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn't happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere...
Emma Donoghue
Do not grieve so much for a husband lost that it wastes away your life.
Euripides
Listen to me: die after me, all right? I don't care what else you do, where you go, how you screw up your life, just... survive. Outlive me, please.
Tracy Letts
- Losing is all that's left, I say.- Losing is all we've got left to lose, you sayThe impossibility of not telling, I cannot do otherwise, one can only tell otherwise, with always the same need to make sense of what you've lost, the need not to lose this feeling of losing, the need to feel yourself not losing this feeling that you are still losing the irreplaceable.
Hélène Cixous
Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?
Arthur Miller
I may bring other women here, to this place, and I may tell them I love them, and make love to them. But they will be impostors. And I will be a ghost. Because it means I will have lost you. My body, my brain, my lungs, my stomach, my guts, legs, arms will be here but I won't be. I will be out there, looking for you. And if we meet somewhere, at a restaurant, or a party and I'm with someone, I want you to know that they are by my side only because you are not. And she will be beautiful. And I will be laughing and smiling and she will be laughing and smiling, but she will be laughing at a lie. Because all I will have done to that person is lie to them. All I will do to anyone else, forever, from this moment forward, anyone who isn't you, is lie. I have no choice.
Jez Butterworth
You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but remains forever, icy and silent.
Harold Pinter
You can go on losing after loss.
Hélène Cixous
It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it
Oscar Wilde
A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them.... His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older.
Oscar Wilde
Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered his son of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more than his goods.He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.
Cormac McCarthy
It's always the same with lost people; you start out looking for them, and you end up losing yourself.
Grant Morrison
Utterly, irrevocably, lost
Oscar Wilde
This tune goes manly.Come, go we to the King. Our power is ready;Our lack is nothing but our leave. MacbethIs ripe for shaking, and the powers abovePut on their instruments. Receive what cheer you may.The night is long that never finds th
William Shakespeare
Chance, you've gone past something you couldn't afford to go past; your time, your youth, you've passed it. It's all you had and you've had it.
Tennessee Williams
Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? Because it is as though the one who is left steps for a time upon a stage and each second swells to an unlimited amount of time and he id watched by many eyes? Because there is a function he must carry out? Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved - so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for a second time in the soul of the living? Why?
Carson McCullers
To move wild laughter in the throat of death? It cannot be, it is impossible: Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.
William Shakespeare
Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.
Euripides