Quotes by Playwrights - Page 185

But I promise you, you guys can do it. In four days you'll be the happiest person Earth has ever seen. You'll stand by the ocean and feel the salty sea spray tingling in your nose. You'll be with people you know and love, and you'all appreciate how beautiful everything is. You'll se cars behind you in your rear view mirror, and maybe you'll laugh at the driver's faces. Because they'll look annoyed, bored, angry. And you'll realize what they're missing. You'll live a long and happy life, Mia. Because when you get home, you'll realize that anything is possible. You mustn't ever forget that.
Johan Harstad
One thing you cannot know: The sudden extinction of every alternative, The unexpected crash of the iron cataract. You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it. You only know what it is not to hope: You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other.
T.S Eliot
There is no water, so things are bad. If there were water, it would be better. But there is no water.
T.S Eliot
Suppression or Invalidation of any innate expression of who or what I am is a crime against myself.
Jean-Jacques Dalpe
The compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable. It is the world's one hope.
Bertolt Brecht
Human mind is the only real hope for the future of humanity! Have faith in human mind which is the only instrument who can protect you in this savage universe!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What will you do now with the gift of your left life?
Carol Ann Duffy
Now I want you to remember something because I don't think we shall meet again very soon. It is this; however fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, think and live fashionably; virtue and honour will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed, self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honour will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so. In short, Davey, God is not dead. And I can assure you God is not mocked.
Robertson Davies
The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
Howard Zinn
In the middle of the night, there is always less hope; in the dawn of the morning, there is always more hope!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Have you lost your hope? Have you remained inside the fog? Don’t worry; even if you can’t find it, a new hope will come and find you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If you wish success in life, make perseverance you bosom friend, experience your wise councellor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.
Joseph Addison
The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities glimpsed in a reading of history different from the customary painful recounting of human cruelties. In such a reading we can find not only war but resistance to war, not only injustice but rebellion against injustice, not only selfishness but self-sacrifice, not only silence in the fact of tyranny but defiance, not only callousness but compassion.Human beings show a broad spectrum of qualities, but it is the worst of these that are usually emphasized, and the result, too often, is to dishearten us, diminish our spirit. And yet, historically, that spirit refuses to surrender.
Howard Zinn
While there is tea, there is hope.")
Arthur Wing Pinero
Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything.
Samuel Beckett
disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible;
Graham Greene
Women think in [Douglas] Sirk’s films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk they think. It’s something that has to be seen. It’s great to see women think. It gives one hope. Honestly.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Four times during the first six days they were assembled and briefed and then sent back. Once, they took off and were flying in formation when the control tower summoned them down. The more it rained, the worse they suffered. The worse they suffered, the more they prayed that it would continue raining. All through the night, men looked at the sky and were saddened by the stars. All through the day, they looked at the bomb line on the big, wobbling easel map of Italy that blew over in the wind and was dragged in under the awning of the intelligence tent every time the rain began. The bomb line was a scarlet band of narrow satin ribbon that delineated the forward most position of the Allied ground forces in every sector of the Italian mainland.For hours they stared relentlessly at the scarlet ribbon on the map and hated it because it would not move up high enough to encompass the city.When night fell, they congregated in the darkness with flashlights, continuing their macabre vigil at the bomb line in brooding entreaty as though hoping to move the ribbon up by the collective weight of their sullen prayers. "I really can't believe it," Clevinger exclaimed to Yossarian in a voice rising and falling in protest and wonder. "It's a complete reversion to primitive superstition. They're confusing cause and effect. It makes as much sense as knocking on wood or crossing your fingers. They really believe that we wouldn't have to fly that mission tomorrow if someone would only tiptoe up to the map in the middle of the night and move the bomb line over Bologna. Can you imagine? You and I must be the only rational ones left."In the middle of the night Yossarian knocked on wood, crossed his fingers, and tiptoed out of his tent to move the bomb line up over Bologna.
Joseph Heller
The door', replied Maimie, 'will always, always be open, and mother will always be waiting at it for me.
J.M. Barrie
If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another name?
Graham Greene
In all my wanderings through this world of care,In all my griefs -- and God has given my share --I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown,Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down;To husband out life's taper at the close,And keep the flame from wasting, by repose:I still had hopes, for pride attends us still,Amidst the swains to show my book-learn'd skill,Around my fire an evening group to draw,And tell of all I felt, and all I saw;And, as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,Pants to the place from whence at first she flew,I still had hopes, my long vexations past,Here to return -- and die at home at last.
Oliver Goldsmith
But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.
Howard Zinn
To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.
Ann-Marie MacDonald
History says, Don’t hopeOn this side of the grave,But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed-for tidal waveOf justice can rise up,And hope and history rhyme
Seamus Heaney
Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn't happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?
Betty Smith
A loss of any kind is horrible. Not because it takes away, but because it makes you believe- in newspapers, in tomatoes, in empty whiskey bottles.
Anosh Irani
True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings.
William Shakespeare
Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.
Graham Greene
Carry the fire.
Cormac McCarthy
There are three lessons I would write-Three words, as with a burning pen, In tracings of eternal light,Upon the heart of men.Have hope! though clouds environ round,And gladness hides her face in scorn,Put thou the shadow from thy brow,No night but hath its morn.Have love! not love alone for one, But man as man thy brother call,And scatter like the circling sun,Thy charities on all.
Friedrich Schiller
Hang in there. It is astonishing how short a time it can take for very wonderful things to happen.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
There had to be dark and muddy waters so that the sun could have something to background it's flashing glory.
Betty Smith
But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.
Robert Ardrey
And worse I may be yet: the worst is notSo long as we can say 'This is the worst.
William Shakespeare
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Václav Havel
When you don't know where you're going, you drive on the highway.
Roger Hedden
Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?
Anton Chekhov
Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.
Tony Kushner
O, wonder!How many goodly creatures are there here!How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,That has such people in't!
William Shakespeare
The chief beauty about timeis that you cannot waste it in advance.The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you,as perfect, as unspoiled,as if you had never wasted or misapplieda single moment in all your life.You can turn over a new leaf every hourif you choose.
Arnold Bennett
The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man
T.S Eliot
TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
Howard Zinn
Yesterday is but a dream,Tomorrow is only a vision. But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Kālidāsa
It's amazing how a little tomorrow can make up for a whole lot of yesterday.
John Guare
When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.
Seán O'Casey
She looked Spencer over, tip to toe, as though she were considering buying him. Then she smiled her friendliest smile and said, "You're rather short, aren't you?" "Don't worry honey," said Mankiewicz, trying desperately to extinguish Spencer's glare. "He'll cut you down to size.
Garson Kanin
...so Leola thought that a modest romance with a hero in embryo could do no harm - might even be a patriotic duty.
Robertson Davies
The slowest kiss makes too much haste.
Thomas Middleton
The course of true love never did run smooth said by lysander
William Shakespeare
For thy sweet love remembr'd such wealth bringsThat then, I scorn to change my state with kings.
William Shakespeare
Why should you think that I should woo in scorn?Scorn and derision never come in tears:Look, when I vow, I weep; and vows so born,tIn their nativity all truth appears.How can these things in me seem scorn to you,Bearing the badge of faith, to prove them true?
William Shakespeare
Viola to Duke Orsino: 'I'll do my bestt t To woo your lady.'[Aside.] 'Yet, a barful strife!t t Whoe'er I woo, myself would be his wife.
William Shakespeare
Love is a smoke rais'd with the fume of sighs; being purg'd, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes; being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears; what is it else? A madness most discreet, a choking gall, and a preserving sweet.
William Shakespeare
Never to be squandered.....the miracle of another human being.
Craig Lucas
The first two things Gaudencio Rivera was made aware of--within hours of arriving by carabao-drawn cart at the secluded town of Tagbaoran on the island province of Palawan--were these: that the most beautiful woman in creation dwelt by the river, and that it was pointless to even dream of being loved by her.
Dean Francis Alfar
Ivanov: And this whole romance of ours is commonplace and trite: he lost heart, and he lost his way. She came along, strong and brave in spirit, and gave him an helping hand. That's all very well and plausible in novels, but in life...Sasha: In life it's the same.Ivanov: I see you have a fine understanding of life!
Anton Chekhov
If you do not love me I shall not be loved. If I do not love you I shall not love.
Samuel Beckett
Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear; Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.
William Shakespeare
If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.
Honoré de Balzac
Men's eyes were made to look, let them gaze, I will budge for no man's pleasure.
William Shakespeare