Quotes by Playwrights - Page 174

Time is the longest distance between two places.
Tennessee Williams
Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
Cormac McCarthy
The best thing about existence is that any moment in time can be a point of beginning to anything! In other words, every moment of our life holds a key for the unknown or the closed doors of new paths!
Mehmet Murat ildan
In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure, death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting.
Cormac McCarthy
The material world coexists alongside the ideal life, and the purest intentions are bound to the earth by ridiculous threads, but they are threads of iron and they are not easily broken.
Alexandre Dumas fils
This whole life is an art of knowing when to sit and when to stand up!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If only you could fully grasp how valuable, how limited and how unique every moment of your life is, you would never stand as still as a statue even a single moment because action is real living!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Life is offering you infinite paths! To get stuck in one path is nothing but shallowness! Go deep, discover other lanes!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Catch the life with the agility of a dog trying to get a hold of the flying Frisbee!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Your life will be simplified when you choose inaction when no action is required and choose action when action is required!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If you concentrate on the road too much, you will miss the view and when you do the opposite, you will miss the road! Life is an art of catching both the road and the view!
Mehmet Murat ildan
With the same habit of mind, even if you live thousands of lives, all will be the same! Get a different habit of mind to get a different life!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Life is sometimes to be a monkey with a monkey, to be a dog with a dog, a bird with a bird, water with water, tree with tree! It is a great wisdom to interiorize the mind of others, in other words, to make their spirit our own spirit!
Mehmet Murat ildan
In moments when you feel that life is unbearably heavy, surrender yourself to the circumstances for a while! When life hits you hard and makes you fall down, take a rest on the ground for a while! Momentaneous non-resistance will give you time to gather your strength!
Mehmet Murat ildan
They say life is a test and this is a ridiculous idea! There is neither examination nor examinant! You encounter problems in life either because you are stupid or your path just crosses with the problems’ path by luck! Nobody is sending you problems to test you! Stay loose and chuck out the irrational idea of ‘test’ at once!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Every impression ever made on a person from newborn babyhood onwards will contribute to the shape and texture of the imagination.
Lesley Glaister
When we feel ourselves very weak, life will look immensely powerful and ruthless! The extent of our power is the key factor in determining how powerful life is! The stronger we are the weaker the life will be!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Your mama coming back. Just cause you cant sees a person aint mean nothing. They still there. You worry you never gonna find your mama but she gonna come to you. Close your eyes. I bets you see her good.
Nancy Rawles
But what I knew then was that nobody-not even my mother-was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself in the surface.
Robertson Davies
Let me tell you: the only way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
Evgeny Shvarts
Life does not accommodate you; it shatters you. Every seed destroys its container, or else there would be no fruition.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
You can't have everything, I've often noticed it.
Samuel Beckett
Live each day as if it were your last, for one day, you're sure to be right.
Kenneth G. Ross
At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls,you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.
Henrik Ibsen
Master, go on, and I will follow theeTo the last gasp with truth and loyalty.
William Shakespeare
Get away from these two types of people: the ones who think you can only go as far as the situation you were born into and the ones who think you can only go as far as the current situation you are in.
Dee Dee M. Scott
The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
What could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it
Edward Albee
Never assume that the person you are dealing with is weaker or less important than you are. Some people are slow to take offense, which may make you misjudge the thickness of their skin, and fail to worry about insulting them. But should you offend their honor and their pride, they will overwhelm you with a violence that seems sudden and extreme given their slowness to anger. If you want to turn people down, it is best to do so politely and respectfully, even if you feel their request is impudent or their offer ridiculous.
Robert Greene
12--Lose Battles, But Win The War: Grand StrategyGrand strategy is the art of looking beyond the present battle and calculating ahead. Focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it.
Robert Greene
Time waits for no one.
Yasutaka Tsutsui
Ever Tried. Ever Failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw
LAW 46Never Appear Too PerfectAppearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. Envy creates silent enemies. It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable. Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity.
Robert Greene
Everything is hard before it is easy
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.
Sinclair Lewis
Black Mary: Leroy. And John. And Cujoe. And Sam. And Robert. One after the other they come and they go. You can't hold on to none of them. They slip right through your hands. They use you up and you can't hold them. They all the time taking till it's gone. They ain't tried to put nothing to it. They ain't got nothing in their hand. They ain't got nothing to add to it. They too busy taking. They taking 'cause they need. You can't blame them for that. They so full of their needs they can't see you. Now here you come. You don't even know what you need. All you see is a woman. You can't see nothing else. You can't think nothing else. That blinds you. (Black Mary turns to him. A new thought occurs to her.)Okay, Mr. Citizen. I'll come to your room tonight. But the morning got to come, Mr. Citizen. What you got then? You tell me tomorrow. You wake up and look at your hands and see what you got. Citizen: I got me. That's all there is. Black Mary: That ain't never gonna be enough.
August Wilson
But you smiled at me and said consolingly, "People come back again.""Yes" I said, "they come back, but then they have forgotten".There must have been something odd, something passionate in the way I said that to you. For you rose to your feet as well and looked at me, affectionately and very surprised. You took me by the shoulders. "What's good is not forgotten; I will not forget you," you said, and as you did so you gazed intently at me as if to memorise my image.
Stefan Zweig
Confusing being mortal with being threatened can occur in any realm. The fact that something could go wrong does not mean that we are in danger. It means we are alive. Mortality is the sign of life. In the most intimate and personal of arenas, many of us have love and trusted someone who violated that trust. So when someone else comes along who intrigues us, whose interests we share, who we enjoy being with, with whom there could b some mutual enrichment and understanding, that does not mean that we are being violated again. Experiencing anxiety does not mean that anyone is doing anything to us that is unjust.
Sarah Schulman
Hesitation creates gaps. Boldness obliterates them.
Robert Greene
That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good.
Oscar Wilde
Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God -- a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.
Graham Greene
The fact was, it was safer to stay uninvolved. He was perfectly fine with emotions, so long as they belonged to other people. Oh, he tried relationships after Peg's death, for a while he really tried, but he couldn't bear to get closed ... [it was easier] to disconnect from that part of life and turn his back on love altogether.Easier to find what he needed in music.
Rachel Joyce
When they got to their hotel she went straight up to bed, but he paused to get a drink. There was, in the vestibule, a flower stall and he bought a handful of roses, stiffly wired into a bouquet, before proceeding to the oppressive gorgeousness of their bridal suite. The lift was lined with looking glass, so that as he shot upwards he got an endlessly duplicated version of himself, stout and nervous, a light cloak flung over his shoulder and flowers in his hand: an infinitely long row of gentlemen carrying offerings to an unforgiving past.
Margaret Kennedy
He was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he caused others.
Graham Greene
I wondered straightaway how he could sit at peace there, of an evening, with the row of heads staring down at him. There were no pictures, no flowers: only the heads of chamois. The concession to melody was the radiogram and the stack of records of classical music.Foolishly, I had asked, "Why only chamois?"He answered at once, "They fear Man."This might have led to an argument about animals in general, domestic, wild, and those which adapt themselves to the whims and vagaries of the human race; but instead he changed the subject abruptly, put on a Sibelius record, and presently made love to me, intently but without emotion. I was surprised but pleased. I thought, "We are suited to one another. There will be no demands. Each of us will be self-contained and not beholden to the other."All this came true, but something was amiss. There was a flaw - not only the nonappearance of children, but a division of the spirit. The communion of flesh which brought us together was in reality a chasm, and I despised the bridge we made. Perhaps he did as well. I had been endeavouring for ten years to build for my self a ledge of safety. ("The Chamois")
Daphne du Maurier
She had searched for just the right guy; sensitive and gentle and willing to wait. Quite a long search, of course. She was looking for some imaginary man who cared more about having someone to talk to and see movies with than he needed to have sex, because she was just Not Ready for That. Did I say imaginary? Well yes. Human men are not like that.
Jeff Lindsay
The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.
Tom Stoppard
LADY BRACKNELLTo speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.
Oscar Wilde
Once," Fran says, settling against the worktable, folding her arms, "I knew this kid who very bravely and bossily came out of the closet when she was only fourteen years old. She told me then that we can't choose who we love. We just love the people we love, no mattter what anyone else might want for us. Wasn't that you?
Madeleine George
That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.
Howard Zinn
He should in humility have asked her why it was that he was naturally a cuckold, why two women of different temperaments and characters had been inspired to have lovers at his expense. He should be telling her, with the warmth of her body warming his, that his second wife had confessed to greater sexual pleasure when she remembered that she was deceiving him.
William Trevor
The women we really love are the women who complete us, who have the qualities we can borrow and so become something nearer to whole men. Just as we complete them, of course; it’s not a one-way thing. Leola and I, when romance was stripped away, were too much alike; our strengths and weaknesses were too nearly the same. Together we would have doubled our gains and our losses, but that isn’t what love is.
Robertson Davies
Men want a girl who looks like a boy. They want to protect her but she must be a survivor. And she must come...like a train...but with...elegance.
Patrick Marber
I am unlovable...I have tried to involve myself in other people, in relationships, and even - in my sillier moments - in love. But it doesn't work. Something in me is broken or missing and sooner or later the other person catches me Acting or one of Those Nights comes along.
Jeff Lindsay
Love affairs are for emotional sprinters the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.
Robertson Davies
I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.
Tom Stoppard
This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.
Sarah Ruhl
Proclaim your pride and bitterness loudly to the world, but to me speak softly, and tell me simply that she doesn't love you.
Edmond Rostand