Quotes by Playwrights - Page 195

The trick. . .is to find the balance between the bright colors of humor and the serious issues of identity, self-loathing, and the possibility for intimacy and love when it seems no longer possible or, sadder yet, no longer necessary.
Wendy Wasserstein
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
Alan Bennett
In heaven an angel is no one in particular.
George Bernard Shaw
The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
Cormac McCarthy
Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows,Help us to seeThat without the dust the rainbowWould not be.
Langston Hughes
The heart may freeze, or it can burn. The pain will ease and I can learn. There is no future, there is no past. I live this moment as, my last.
Jonathan Larson
One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her.
W Somerset Maugham
For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.” But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
Cormac McCarthy
We wait and think and doubt and hate. How does it make you feel? The overwhelming feeling is rage. We hate ourself for being unable to be other than what we are. Unable to be better. We feel rage. The feelings must be followed. It doesn't matter whether you're an ideologue or a sensualist, you follow the stimuli thinking that they're your signposts to the promised land. But they are nothing of the kind. What they are is rocks to navigate the past, each on your brush against, ripping you a little more open and they are always more on the horizon. But you can't face up to the that, so you force yourself to believe the bullshit of those you instinctively know are liars and you repeat those lies to yourself and to others, hoping that by repeating them often and fervently enough you'll attain the godlike status we accord those who tell the lies most frequently and most passionately. But you never do, and even if you could, you wouldn't value it, you'd realise that nobody believes in heroes any more. We know that they only want to sell us something we don't really want and keep from us what we really do need. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe we're getting in touch with our condition at last. It's horrible how we always die alone, but no worse than living alone.
Irvine Welsh
It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end. Let whoever canwin glory before death. When a warrior is gone,that will be his best and only bulwark.
Seamus Heaney
It’s life. You don’t figure it out. You just climb up on the beast and ride.
Rebecca Wells
Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.
Václav Havel
There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
T.S Eliot
No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.
Samuel Beckett
You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.
Anton Chekhov
Everybody's damaged by something.
Emma Donoghue
I'm going to enjoy every second, and I'm going to know I'm enjoying it while I'm enjoying it. Most people don't live; they just race. They are trying to reach some goal far away on the horizon, and in the heat of the going they get so breathless and panting that they lose sight of the beautiful, tranquil country they are passing through; and then the first thing they know, they are old and worn out, and it doesn't make any difference whether they've reached the goal or not.
Jean Webster
Like madness is the glory of this life.
William Shakespeare
In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.
Peter Stone
You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
Alan Bennett
Demasiada cordura puede ser la peor de las locuras, ver la vida como es y no como debería de ser.Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.
Joseph Heller
I know there is no straight road No straight road in this world Only a giant labyrinth Of intersecting crossroads
Federico García Lorca
People don't always want to be with people. It gets tiring.
Emma Donoghue
He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.
Cormac McCarthy
The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.
Samuel Beckett
You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it.
Tennessee Williams
Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.
Tennessee Williams
To live is to war with trolls.
Henrik Ibsen
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination. I, myself, even in this day and at my age, have great need of recalling the miraculous lives of the Saints and the great miracles that have come to pass on earth. Only by having these things in my mind can I live beyond what I have to live for.
Betty Smith
You look ridiculous if you danceYou look ridiculous if you don't danceSo you might as welldance.
Gertrude Stein
All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players;They have their exits and their entrances,And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchelAnd shining morning face, creeping like snailUnwillingly to school. And then the lover,Sighing like furnace, with a woeful balladMade to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,Seeking the bubble reputationEven in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,In fair round belly with good capon lined,With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,Full of wise saws and modern instances;And so he plays his part. The sixth age shiftsInto the lean and slippered pantaloon,With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wideFor his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,Turning again toward childish treble, pipesAnd whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,That ends this strange eventful history,Is second childishness and mere oblivion,Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
William Shakespeare
Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.
Cormac McCarthy
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Thornton Wilder
I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.
Daphne du Maurier
I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
W Somerset Maugham
I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.
Dodie Smith
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
Langston Hughes
You are -- your life, and nothing else.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
William Shakespeare
Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lustLike diamonds we are cut with our own dust
John Webster
Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.You forget some things, dont you?Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
Cormac McCarthy
People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.
Cormac McCarthy
There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
T.S Eliot
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
Cormac McCarthy
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Graham Greene
All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
Seán O'Casey
Don't live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable.
Wendy Wasserstein
The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.
Bertolt Brecht
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
For I have known them all already, known them all—Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
T.S Eliot
If you've never eaten while crying you don t know what life tastes like.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.
William Shakespeare
Life ... is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
George Bernard Shaw
Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
Jean Racine
You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.
Samuel Beckett