Quotes by Playwrights - Page 42

Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?" "I do," Dunbar told him. "Why?" Clevinger asked. "What else is there?
Joseph Heller
What could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream
Cormac McCarthy
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
George Bernard Shaw
Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there's the trick!
Mikhail Bulgakov
Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it's the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we're finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it's better to die having made the journey we're been longing for than to be stifled by our longing.
Thomas Bernhard
She had never been taught to ask permission to do things, and she knew nothing at all about authority, so she would not have thought it necessary to ask Mrs. Medlock if she might walk about the house, even if she had seen her.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.
Oscar Wilde
Nice customs curtsy to great kings.
William Shakespeare
The course of true love never die run smooth
William Shakespeare
There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.
Cormac McCarthy
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,That he should weep for her?
William Shakespeare
One can't have literary comprehension without real experience, mere grammatical knowledge of the words is useless without recognition of their values, and when you young people want to understand a country and its language you should start by seeing it at its most beautiful, in the strength of its youth, at its most passionate. You should begin by hearing the language in the mouths of the poets who create and perfect it, you must have felt poetry warm and alive in your hearts before we smart anatomizing it.
Stefan Zweig
Thus with most careful devotionThus with precise attentionTo detail, interfering preparationOf that which is already preparedMen tighten the knot of confusionInto perfect misunderstanding.
T.S Eliot
Thoughts of some special people are like the stairs, they take you up to the upstairs floors; some are like the wings, they take you up to the skies and some are like the light itself, they take you right to the stars and the beyond! And such are the thoughts of Buddha!
Mehmet Murat ildan
People go to the movies instead of moving.
Tennessee Williams
One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.
Josephine Tey
When you are bored of the plains, the secret passages to the mountains suddenly appear out of nowhere before you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom—ah the soul-destroying boredom—of long days of mild content.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Borkin: Ladies and gentlemen, why are you so glum? Sitting there like a jury after it's been sworn in! ... Let's think up something. What would you like? Forfeits, tug of war, catch, dancing, fireworks?
Anton Chekhov
Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.
William Inge
I close my eyes and think of what might be possible. And, in my mind, I see fireworks over the Hudson.
Christy Hall
That moment when a knot forms in your throat, but you choose to throw your head back and laugh instead.
Christy Hall
Wear yourself proudly.
Christy Hall
Be what you are, all that you are. Wear yourself proudly. It will require that you draw a line, but that line in the sand is your courage.
Christy Hall
Airport bars are more like film sets, the bathrooms reminiscent of dormitories. Everyone is waiting to go somewhere, suspended in nowhere...
Christy Hall
She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.
J.B. Priestley
I believe in mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness. Not caring doesn’t seem much different from not loving.
Tom Stoppard
Hast thou found out, Voltaire, that it is bliss to die, And does thy hideous smile over thy bleached bones fly?
Alfred de Musset
Here is a fact for you: Your prison is made by yourself!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Truth is not the same for everyone whereas facts are.
John Day
There's some ill planet reigns:I must be patient till the heavens lookWith an aspect more favourable. Good my lords,I am not prone to weeping, as our sexCommonly are; the want of which vain dewPerchance shall dry your pities: but I haveThat honourable grief lodged here which burnsWorse than tears drown: beseech you all, my lords,With thoughts so qualified as your charitiesShall best instruct you, measure me; and soThe king's will be perform'd!
William Shakespeare
Interest makes some people blind and others quick-sighted.
Francis Beaumont
Those who have never seen themselves surrounded on all sides by the sea can never possess an idea of the world, and of their relation to it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We must endure, Alyosha." That was the only thing she could say in response to my accounts of the ugliness and dreariness of life, of the suffering of the people — of everything against which I protested so vehemently. I was not made for endurance, and if occasionally I exhibited this virtue of cattle, wood, and stone, I did so only to test myself, to try my strength and my stability. Sometimes young people, in the foolishness of immaturity, or in envy of the strength of their elders, strive, even successfully, to lift weights that overtax their bones and muscles; in their vanity they attempt to cross themselves with two-pood weights, like mature athletes. I too did this, in the literal and figurative sense, physically and spiritually, and only good fortune kept me from injuring myself fatally or crippling myself for life.For nothing cripples a person so dreadfully as endurance, as a humble submission to the forces of circumstance.
Maxim Gorky
The more a man judges, the less he loves
Honoré de Balzac
The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban's enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban's fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror.
Oscar Wilde
Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed.Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn't quite sure he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art or about the flies Orr saw in Appleby's eyes. he had Orr's word to take for Appleby's eyes.
Joseph Heller
She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.
W Somerset Maugham
At first it's pretty cool: the limitless fruit of knowledge hanging low in your path. Then you realize it's the only thing to eat around here.
Rajiv Joseph
Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well.Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta.Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.
Oscar Wilde
What's foreign one can't always keep quite clear of,For good things, oft, are not so near;A German can't endure the French to see or hear of,Yet drinks their wines with hearty cheer.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If you are not reading and thinking, it means that your windows looking to the ocean are closed!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting
Dodie Smith
After reading a book, you become someone else: Now you are not you, but you plus the book!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Reading was artificial borrowed life, benefiting from ideas and sensations transmitted cerebrally, acquiring the treasures of human truth by purchase or swindle, not by work.
Benito Pérez Galdós
And it occurred to her that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks, they were hardly jokes, that she had not even noticed before.
Alan Bennett
One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.
Alan Bennett
Don’t get stuck in one candle; find other candles, create other candles!
Mehmet Murat ildan
He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear His hopes 'bove wisdom, grace and fear:And you all know, securityIs mortals' chiefest enemy.
William Shakespeare
You like the wind? There is no wind? Start running! Create your own wind!
Mehmet Murat ildan
the very least we can live with is an agreement that does not reduce us to slaves of imposition, but makes us partners of consent. Yes, we are compelled to make peace, we submit to force majeure, but leave us at least a piece of clothing to cover our nudity. This is the motivation behind every formula of diplomatic contrivance that is sometimes described as face-saving, and wise indeed is the victor who knows that, in order to shield his own rear from the elements, he must not denude his opponents.
Wole Soyinka
Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.
Richard Hughes
One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she is a householder.
Thornton Wilder
Then don't. I can't help you. They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don't dream at all. You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don't ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you'll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. I know because I would have never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and sheild it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.
Cormac McCarthy
Where is the fun of living if you are going to make yourself a slave to all sorts of petty rules?" asked Patty wearily.
Jean Webster
I am willing to take life as a game of chess in which the first rules are not open to discussion. No one asks why the knight is allowed his eccentric hop, why the castle may only go straight and the bishop obliquely. These things are to be accepted, and with these rule the game must be played: it is foolish to complain of them.
W Somerset Maugham
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
George Bernard Shaw
In every country where there is a vicious oppression, a peaceful and a continuous civil disobedience is the magical door opening to the freedom!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When I was a child, to call someone 'black' was an insult, a curse word, something that made you fight.But to me it contains all of the history of oppression and resistance, of being close to the soil and the sky, of plain speaking. Of The Journey.
Bonnie Greer