Quotes by Playwrights - Page 132

But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.
Samuel Beckett
I'm all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I'm something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast, and that I seek, like such a beast, with my little strength, such a beast, with nothing of its species left but fear and fury, no, the fury is past, nothing but fear, nothing of all its due but fear centupled, fear of its shadow, no, blind from birth, of sound then, if you like, we'll have that, one must have something, it's a pity, but there it is, fear of sound, fear of sounds, the sounds of beasts, the sounds of men, sounds in the daytime and sounds at night, that's enough, fear of sounds all sounds, more or less, more or less fear, all sounds, there's only one, continuous, day and night, what is it, it's steps coming and going, it's voices speaking for a moment, it's bodies groping their way, it's the air, it's things, it's the air among the things, that's enough, that I seek, like it, no, not like it, like me, in my own way, what am I saying, after my fashion, that I seek, what do I seek now, what it is, it must be that, it can only be that, what it is, what it can be, what what can be, what I seek, no, what I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, they say I seek what it is I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, what it can possibly be, and where it can possibly come from, since all is silent here, and the walls thick, and how I manage, without feeling an ear on me, or a head, or a body, or a soul, how I manage, to do what, how I manage, it's not clear, dear dear, you say it's not clear, something is wanting to make it clear, I'll seek, what is wanting, to make everything clear, I'm always seeking something, it's tiring in the end, and it's only the beginning.
Samuel Beckett
The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.
Eugène Ionesco
I don’t know: perhaps it’s a dream, all a dream. (That would surprise me.) I’ll wake, in the silence, and never sleep again. (It will be I?) Or dream (dream again), dream of a silence, a dream silence, full of murmurs (I don’t know, that’s all words), never wake (all words, there’s nothing else).You must go on, that’s all I know.They’re going to stop, I know that well: I can feel it. They’re going to abandon me. It will be the silence, for a moment (a good few moments). Or it will be mine? The lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts? It will be I?You must go on.I can’t go on.You must go on.I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know.You must go on.I can’t go on.I’ll go on.
Samuel Beckett
Words Like FreedomThere are words like FreedomSweet and wonderful to say.On my heartstrings freedom singsAll day everyday.There are words like LibertyThat almost make me cry.If you had known what I knowYou would know why.
Langston Hughes
Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes.
Ben Jonson
And I? I drink, I burn, I gather dreams.And sometimes I tell a story. Because Promethea asks me for a bowl of words before she goes to sleep.
Hélène Cixous
No writer can be the ‘Master of the Words’ without loving them! Loving is the way for Mastering! No Love, no Master!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Words are never insufficient to describe any situation. It is the talent to use the words which is the insufficient one!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns...It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I.
Jean-Paul Sartre
If your words touch the hearts, that’s good; if your words touch the minds, that’s better and if your words touch both the hearts and the minds, that is the best!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You may hear bad words but you always use soft words that carry the air of flowers!
Mehmet Murat ildan
There is indeed power in words. Most of the lasting change that has been forged in the history of this world came not from a wielding of the swift and bloody sword of battle but from the shaping scalpel of ideas, and what are ideas without the words to deliver them?
Mark Dunn
Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.
Cormac McCarthy
...speak to me as to thy thinkingAs thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughtsThe worst of words...
William Shakespeare
We must be loyal to the truth, not to our words! Change your words if they are not compatible with the truth; go back on your words, throw them to the bin!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I look at words as if they were entities, sacred beings. There are words to which I tip my hat when I see them sitting on a page.
William Luce
The point I am trying to make is that words are a mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness. . . . They can equally be lethal arrows. Worst of all, at times they can be one or the other. They can even be both at once!
Václav Havel
I don't like compliments and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.
Oscar Wilde
One of the difficulties of thinking clearly about anything is that it is almost impossible not to form our ideas in words which have some previous association for us; with the result that our thought is already shaped along certain lines before we have begun to follow it out. Again, a word may have various meanings, and our use of it in one sense may deceive our readers (or even ourselves) into supposing that we were using it in some other sense.
A.A. Milne
Before I spoke with people, I did not think of all these things because there was no one to bother to think them for. Now things just come out of my mouth which are true.
Bernard Pomerance
Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather an other chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
Oscar Wilde
It is not in words that I should wish my life to be distinguished, but rather in things done.
Sophocles
Oratory should raise your heart rate. Oratory should blow the doors off the place.
Aaron Sorkin
Women's Tongues are as sharp as two-edged Swords, and wound as much, when they are anger'd.
Margaret Cavendish
They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
William Shakespeare
All in all, I'd heard people do a lot of things with words. I'd heard them not say what they meant and I'd seen them not do what they said, but I'd never met a person who could speak so simply and still convey so much.
Rachel Joyce
Take it for words. O woman’s poor revenge,Which dwells but in the tongue!
John Webster
i done forgot all abt wordsaint got no definitions
Ntozake Shange
I am surprised to see how much I have written; with stories even a page can take me hours, but the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down. But words are very inadequate – anyway, my words are.
Dodie Smith
O, let my books be then the eloquenceAnd dumb presagers of my speaking breast;Who plead for love, and look for recompense,More than that tongue that more hath more express'd.O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.
William Shakespeare
Suit the action to the word, theWord to the action.
William Shakespeare
It has always been my custom to treat words with respect. I can recall the time...when I knew words would be my life's work
Margaret Edson
It is only too evident that the invisible agitations of the kingdoms within us are arbitrarily set on foot by the thoughts we shelter. Our myriad intuitions are the veiled queens who steer our course through life, though we have no words in which to speak of them. How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words!
Maurice Maeterlinck
I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.
Gertrude Stein
I have always been obsessed with naming things. If I could name them, I could tame them. They could be my friends.
Eve Ensler
I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world.
Tennessee Williams
You can save hundred words with just one look!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Powerful words always travel the whole world!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I was on the point of breaking off the conversation, for nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A picture tells a thousand words. But you get a thousand pictures from someone's voice.
Paul Fleischman
I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way.
Carol Ann Duffy
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
Seamus Heaney
nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
But who has time to write memoirs? I’m still living my memoirs.
Rebecca Wells
All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.
Samuel Beckett
Men of few words are the best men."(3.2.41)
William Shakespeare
Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .
Oscar Wilde
For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.
T.S Eliot
In the language of the day it is customary to describe a certain sort of book as “escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life which the critic knows so well in W.C.1: and may even have the disastrous effect on the reader of taking him happily for a few hours out of his own real life in N.W.8. Why this should be a matter for regret I do not know; nor why realism in a novel is so much admired when realism in a picture is condemned as mere photography; nor, I might add, why drink and fornication should seem to bring the realist closer to real life than, say, golf and gardening.
A.A. Milne
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships--and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes--husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer...
Tom Stoppard
You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instrumentsproducing a confused agreeable massof sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.
Arnold Bennett
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.    To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.      The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Oscar Wilde
In literature, you either create a classical or create a foam! There is no in between!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Writers are engineers of human souls.
Yury Olesha
Literature is a mountain made of gold in this poor world!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We have invented the literature because the reality wasn’t imaginative enough and we also wanted to be alone, at least for a while!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A rural Venus, Selah rises from thegold foliage of the Sixhiboux River, sweepspetals of water from her skin. At once,clouds begin to sob for such beauty.Clothing drops like leaves."No one makes poetry,my Mme.Butterfly, my Carmen, in Whylah,”I whisper. She smiles: “We’ll shape it withour souls.”Desire illuminates the dark manuscriptof our skin with beetles and butterflies.After the lightning and rain has ceased,after the lightning and rain of lovemakinghas ceased, Selah will dive again into thesunflower-open river.
George Elliott Clarke
And if I am not mistaken here is the secret of the greatness that was Spain. In Spain it is men that are the poems, the pictures and the buildings. Men are its philosophies. They lived, these Spaniards of the Golden Age; they felt and did; they did not think. Life was what they sought and found, life in its turmoil, its fervour and its variety. Passion was the seed that brought them forth and passion was the flower they bore. But passion alone cannot give rise to a great art. In the arts the Spaniards invented nothing. They did little in any of those they practised, but give a local colour to a virtuosity they borrowed from abroad. Their literature, as I have ventured to remark, was not of the highest rank; they were taught to paint by foreign masters, but, inapt pupils, gave birth to one painter only of the very first class; they owed their architecture to the Moors, the French and the Italians, and the works themselves produced were best when they departed least from their patterns. Their preeminence was great, but it lay in another direction: it was a preeminence of character. In this I think they have been surpassed by none and equalled only by the ancient Romans. It looks as though all the energy, all the originality, of this vigorous race had been disposed to one end and one end only, the creation of man. It is not in art that they excelled, they excelled in what is greater than art--in man. But it is thought that has the last word.
W Somerset Maugham