Quotes by Playwrights - Page 196

It's not the men in your life that matters, it's the life in your men.
Mae West
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
George Bernard Shaw
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.
Nikolai Gogol
Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
T.S Eliot
Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere - be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.
Betty Smith
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
W Somerset Maugham
Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.
Thomas Keneally
I’ve known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them...to break their spirit. And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and don’t ask quarters.
Horton Foote
I'll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.
Mae West
The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.
Peter Shaffer
Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself.
Harvey Fierstein
To be, or not to be: that is the question:Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to sufferThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;No more; and by a sleep to say we endThe heart-ache and the thousand natural shocksThat flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummationDevoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;For in that sleep of death what dreams may comeWhen we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause: there's the respectThat makes calamity of so long life;For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,The insolence of office and the spurnsThat patient merit of the unworthy takes,When he himself might his quietus makeWith a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,To grunt and sweat under a weary life,But that the dread of something after death,The undiscover'd country from whose bournNo traveller returns, puzzles the willAnd makes us rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others that we know not of?Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;And thus the native hue of resolutionIs sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,And enterprises of great pith and momentWith this regard their currents turn awry,And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisonsBe all my sins remember'd!
William Shakespeare
One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.
A.A. Milne
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
Life is for the living.Death is for the dead.Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.
Langston Hughes
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
Mae West
Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' - not even the most important - because my life no longer belongs to me because...you are always me.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.
Graham Greene
You know, Miss Holly, you look very dramatic like that, backlit by the fire. Very attractive, if I may say so. I know you shared a moment passionne with Artemis which he subsequently fouled up with his typical boorish behavior. Let me just throw something out there for you to consider while we're chasing the probe: I share Artemis's passion but not his boorishness. No pressure; just think about it.This was enough to elicit a deafening moment of silence even in the middle of a crisis, which Orion seemed to be blissfully unaffected by.
Eoin Colfer
When a woman loves you she's not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.
W Somerset Maugham
But she needs me more than she needs him and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.
Betty Smith
I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.
Dodie Smith
But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.
Carson McCullers
I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.
William Shakespeare
...no woman can love a weak man hard enough to make him strong.
Pearl Cleage
You see, there are some people that one loves, and others that perhaps one would rather be with.
Henrik Ibsen
This is the true measure of love: when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If love be rough with you, be rough with love. Prick love for pricking and you beat love down.
William Shakespeare
What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.
George Bernard Shaw
I pray you, do not fall in love with me, for I am falser than vows made in wine.
William Shakespeare
I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?
Graham Greene
Love moderately. Long love doth so.Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.*Love each other in moderation. That is the key to long-lasting love. Too fast is as bad as too slow.*
William Shakespeare
Sometimes I turn around and catch the smell of you and I cannot go on I cannot fucking go on without expressing this terrible so fucking awful physical aching fucking longing I have for you. And I cannot believe that I can feel this for you and you feel nothing. Do you feel nothing?
Sarah Kane
Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish'd and cured is that the lunacy is soordinary that the whippers are in love too.
William Shakespeare
The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.
Stefan Zweig
love is blindand lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit
William Shakespeare
The fiercest anger of all, the most incurable,Is that which rages in the place of dearest love.
Euripides
You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,Blowing on a miserable fire,Made from your heap of dying ash.Let apes and children praise your art,If their admiration’s to your taste,But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.
Thornton Wilder
After all, my erstwhile dear,My no longer cherished,Need we say it was not love,Just because it perished?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Under loves heavy burden do I sink.--Romeo
William Shakespeare
I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love.
Françoise Sagan
I know I am but summer to your heart,And not the full four seasons of the year;And you must welcome from another partSuch noble moods as are not mine, my dear.No gracious weight of golden fruits to sellHave I, nor any wise and wintry thing;And I have loved you all too long and wellTo carry still the high sweet breast of Spring.Wherefore I say: O love, as summer goes,I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums, That you may hail anew the bird and roseWhen I come back to you, as summer comes.Else will you seek, at some not distant time, Even your summer in another clime.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.
Mikhail Bulgakov
I’ll follow thee and make a heaven of hell,To die upon the hand I love so well.
William Shakespeare
There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy.
Jean Anouilh
O, hereWill I set up my everlasting rest,And shake the yoke of inauspicious starsFrom this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O youThe doors of breath, seal with a righteous kissA dateless bargain to engrossing death!
William Shakespeare
If music be the food of love, play on.
William Shakespeare
Love entered in my heart one dayA sad, unwelcome guest.But when it begged that it might stayI let it stay and restIt broke my nights with sorrowingIt filled my heart with fearsAnd, when my soul was prone to sing,It filled my eyes with tears.But...now that it has gone its way,I miss the dear ole pain.And, sometimes, in the night I prayThat Love might come again.
J. California Cooper
Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.
Dodie Smith
Those we love never truly leave us, Harry. There are things that death cannot touch.
Jack Thorne
Love comforteth like sunshine after rain.
William Shakespeare
I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)
Eve Ensler
When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.
Natalie Clifford Barney
For which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?
William Shakespeare
Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar's vile tongue be cut out! Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!
Mikhail Bulgakov