Quotes by Playwrights - Page 165

I know how men in exile feed on dreams
Aeschylus
...and then, in dreaming, / The clouds methought would open and show riches / Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked / I cried to dream again.
William Shakespeare
Dreams are manifestations of identities.
Kathy Acker
True, I talk of dreams,Which are the children of an idle brain,Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,Which is as thin of substance as the air,And more inconstant than the wind, who woos Even now the frozen bosom of the north,And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence,Turning his side to the dew-dropping south.
William Shakespeare
The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
Oscar Wilde
Dreams are illustrations...from the book your soul is writing about you.
Marsha Norman
If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended,That you have but slumbered hereWhile these visions did appear.And this weak and idle theme,No more yielding but a dream,Gentles, do not reprehend:If you pardon, we will mend:And, as I am an honest Puck,If we have unearned luckNow to 'scape the serpent's tongue,We will make amends ere long;Else the Puck a liar call;So, good night unto you all.Give me your hands, if we be friends,And Robin shall restore amends.
William Shakespeare
Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.
Ingmar Bergman
Hold fast to dreamsfor if dreams dielife is a broken-winged birdthat can not fly.Hold fast to dreamsfor when dreams golife is a barren fieldfrozen with snow.
Langston Hughes
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
William Shakespeare
I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.
Langston Hughes
I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.
A.A. Milne
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
William Shakespeare
Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Oscar Wilde
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. ... War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way...War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god...Men of god and men of war have strange affinities.
Cormac McCarthy
A country which prefers guns to flowers will live the beauty of the flowers only in its graveyards!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What about our human rights,' demanded Carl, who'd gathered a small deputation of kids within minutes. 'There is a WAR ON,' said Crewman Devlin, shortly. I wondered if this meant grown-ups actually listen to you when there wasn't a war on, because somehow I was sceptical.
Sophia McDougall
But still. It has to end sometime. Wars always do. Everything has to end,' said Josephine, eating another ginger biscuit and getting unexpectedly philosophical. 'Yeah. Things like human civilisation,' I said.
Sophia McDougall
Like every thoughtful parent in every age of history, Neil consoled himself, "My generation failed, but this new one is going to change the entire world, and go piously to the polls even on rainy election-days, and never drink more than one cocktail, and end all war.
Sinclair Lewis
He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt...
Joseph Heller
For a chic and an honorable full victory, you must make your own fight and win your own battle entirely by yourself! Try to refuse any help to get a pure victory, a victory which belongs merely to yourself!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Against the claims of a violent "human nature" there is enormous historical evidence that people, when free of a manufactured nationalist or religious hysteria, are more inclined to be compassionate than cruel. When citizens have an opportunity to learn of vicious acts committed by their own governments, they react with indignation and protest.So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.
Howard Zinn
When private bands of fanatics commit atrocities we call them "terrorists," which they are, and have no trouble dismissing their reasons. But when governments do the same, and on a much larger scale, the word "terrorism" is not used, and we consider it a sign of our democracy that the acts become subject to debate. If the word "terrorism" has a useful meaning (and I believe it does, because it marks off an act as intolerable, since it involves the indiscriminate use of violence against human beings for some political purpose), then it applies exactly to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Howard Zinn
Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look at the little I will be leaving.
Graham Greene
There isn’t a viler creature on earth than a politician who sends the children of others to the war but not his own children!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Dawn, slowly filling Church Street with grey light, disclosed another day of war. Because it did this, this dawn bore no more resemblance to a peace-time dawn than the aspect of nature on a Sunday bears a resemblance to the aspect of nature on a weekday. Thus it seemed that dawn itself had been grimly harnessed to the war effort.
Patrick Hamilton
The easiest way to forget about the people who are dying in wars right now is to close our eyes and ears! And this is also the ugliest and the vilest way!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.
Graham Greene
They killed him because he was too innocent to live.
Graham Greene
Thus looked at from outside, these guests --in this dead-and-alive dining room, of this dead-and-alive house, of this dead-and-alive street, of this dead-and-alive little town--in grey, dead winter of the deadliest part of the most deadly war in history--thus seen from a detached point of view, they presented an extraordinary spectacle.
Patrick Hamilton
It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover.
Graham Greene
Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.
Graham Greene
Innocence always calls mutely or protection when we would be so much wise to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
Graham Greene
Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again.
Graham Greene
One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.
Graham Greene
Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But the trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
Cormac McCarthy
In the matter of war, ask this question to yourself and to your own fellow country men: Have you ever seen any politician in your country without legs, without arms, without eyes after war? No! You can’t see such a thing because honourless politicians always stay in the safe ports while they send others to the zone of death!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The key to staying unintimidated is to convince yourself that the person you're facing is a mere mortal, no different from you-- which is in fact the truth. See the person, not the myth. Imagine him or her as a child, as someone riddled with insecurities. Cutting the other person down to size will help your keep your mental balance.
Robert Greene
Such subtle covenants shall be made, Till peace itself is war in masquerade.
John Dryden
Yes, there are plenty of politicians who are liars, there is no doubt about this! But some of them are not only liars but also serial killers because they deliberately send people to the wars!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Love and war are exactly alike. It is lawful to use tricks and slights to obtain a desired end.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The luckiest generation in a country is always the one which has never went through any war in their lifetimes!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
Joseph Heller
Nine-nine of every hundred among you probably desire peace, while the balance may hold war a condition to be preferred; but what can be the mental norm of statesmanship where such a minority conquer the peace-lovers?
Eden Phillpotts
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.
Ernst Toller
They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.' He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him.
Graham Greene
When Buzz gets in, he won't be having any parade of wounded soldiers. That'll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he'll hide away in institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter cattle in uniforms.
Sinclair Lewis
Sometimes I see myself driving through hell with this wagon and selling brimstone. And sometimes I’m driving through heaven handing our provisions to wandering souls! If only we could find a place where there’s no shooting, me and my children—what’s left of ‘em—we might rest a while.
Bertolt Brecht
So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth even starting a train of thought.
Graham Greene
Boys fight the wars. We’d have the brotherhood of man tomorrow if the politicians had to get out and fight.
Herman Wouk
And there they ring the walls, the young, the lithe. The handsome hold the graves they won in Troy; the enemy earth rides over those who conquered.
Aeschylus
It is a foible of our human nature that when we have an extremely unpleasant experience, it gives us a peculiar satisfaction if it is “the biggest” of its disagreeable kind that has happened since the world began. During a heat wave, for instance, we are very pleased if the papers announce that it is “the highest temperature reached since the year 1881,” and we feel a little resentment towards the year 1881 for having gone us one better. Or if our ears are frozen till all the skin peels off, it fills us with a certain happiness to learn that “it was the hardest frost recorded since 1786.” It is just the same with wars. The war in progress is either the most righteous or the bloodiest, or the most successful, or the longest, since such and such a time; any superlative whatever always affords us the proud satisfaction of having been through something extraordinary and record-breaking.
Karel Čapek
I see this as the central issue of our time: how to find a substitute for war in human ingenuity, imagination, courage, sacrifice, patience...War is not inevitable, however persistent it is, however long a history it has in human affairs. It does not come out of some instinctive human need. It is manufactured by political leaders, who then must make a tremendous effort--by enticement, by propaganda, by coercion--to mobilize a normally reluctant population to go to war.
Howard Zinn
Wars are the strongest evidence for the claim that man is still a wild animal.
Mehmet Murat ildan
Are there anything more dishonourable and more coward than not marching in front of the army after taking the decision of war as a politician? Sending others for dying but keeping himself in safety is the affair of the low man only!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Every time a war ends, under a beautiful sun, on the face of a crying child; I see a rainbow of hope over the innocent teardrops.
Mehmet Murat ildan
The war against the war is the only war that shall give you a great honour and a real peace!
Mehmet Murat ildan
one may know how to gain victory, and know not how to use it
Pedro Calderón de la Barca
All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife's response that came - as if in compensation for too little said before - when he wondered why his wandering had led him back to these old battlefields: in his sixty-ninth year he was establishing his survivor's status.
William Trevor