Quotes by Playwrights - Page 45

No, that was my privilege.
Dodie Smith
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
William Shakespeare
…a bar he sometimes sneaked into called The Slab. (They served bloody marys and zombies – stiff drinks they called them – and the jukebox only played dirges. A spotlight pinned dead go-go boys in cages, and though he’d never ventured to the refrigerated back room, he’d heard stories.)
Robert Dunbar
At the door, there was one of those moment when two people realize that they like each other more than they know each other. This is nicer than the opposite situation, but more awkward. You try to remember the protocol for touching. You hate to gush, or presume to much, yet you are unwilling to let the moment pass without without some gesture
Emma Donoghue
They jogged along in silence, Jem playing with the thong of the whip, and Mary aware of his hands beside her. She glanced down at them out of the tail of her eye, and she saw they were long and slim; they had the same strength, the same grace, as his brother's. These attracted her; the others repelled her. She realised for the first time that aversion and attraction ran side by side; that the boundary line was thin between them. The thought was an unpleasant one, and she shrank from it. Supposing this had been Joss beside her ten, twenty years ago? She shuttered the comparison at the back of her mind, fearing the picture it conjured. She knew now why she hated her uncle.
Daphne du Maurier
Then is courtesy a turncoat. But it is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted: and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart; for, truly, I love none. Beatrice: A dear happiness to women: they would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God and my cold blood, I am of your humour for that: I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me. -Much Ado About Nothing
William Shakespeare
...he had read von Lambert's book on terrorism, there were two pages devoted to the Arab resistance movement, von Lambert refused to call them terrorists, which didn't preclude, and he had emphasized this, that nonterrorists were also capable of atrocities, Auschwitz, for instance, was not the work of terrorists but of state employees...
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.
Oscar Wilde
Why d’you think she did it?”I told him I had no idea. He seemed disappointed that I shouldn’t know.“A broken heart,” I suggested.“Do people suffer so much?”“For love? Oh, I imagine so.”“To drown herself?”“Why does that astonish you? Dido threw herself on the flames.”“In legend.”“And real life’s different?” I asked.
Ronald Frame
I know I am but summer to your heart, And not the full four seasons of the year; And you must welcome from another part Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear. No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing; And I have loved you all too long and well To 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 rose When 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
The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear we should not judge. We should just say, poor Camille, she turned into a bitch the way most people would have—and stay out of her way.
Ann-Marie MacDonald
It drives me crazy who quickly the great ones get canonized. 'Blah-blah-blah is such a terrible loss.' Does that mean that the death of one mediocre slob is not as terrible? Do fags have to be geniuses to justify living?
Sarah Schulman
I despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others.
Eve Ensler
The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.
Oscar Wilde
Surely, of all creatures that have life and will, we women are the most wretched. When, for an extravagant sum, we have bought a husband, we must then accept him as possessor of our body.
Euripides
I dreamt that I took William Burrough’s penis and tied it up with piano wire. I hung him like a Chagall painting…In the next part J.G. Ballard swam through streets of female urine. The girls read his book Crash and then mowed him down with their Volkswagen, crushing his chest slowly against a brick wall. As he screamed in agony larger than representation can accommodate, they referred to his text and had orgasms. Later, they jumped up and down yelling, ‘You’re not a hero. You’re not a hero. You’re not. You’re not. You’re not.’ ““How do you analyze that part of the dream, Anna?”…”I guess I’m nervous about my birthday.
Sarah Schulman
Brains are an asset, if you hide them.
Mae West
If God had wanted us to think with our wombs, why did he give us a brain?
Clare Boothe Luce
A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.
Peter Shaffer
I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
Oscar Wilde
Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood
Oscar Wilde
For love, as she knew it now, was something without shame and without reserve, the possession of two people who had no barrier between them, and no pride; whatever happened to him would happen to her too, all feeling, all movement, all sensation of body and of mind.
Daphne du Maurier
In any case, the goal is the same: to connect.
Nicolas Billon
Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact --
Tom Stoppard
There are all these people here I don't know by sight or by name. And we pass alongside each other and don't have any connection. And they don't know me and I don't know them. And now I'm leaving town and there are all these people I will never know.
Carson McCullers
I don't mind him not talking so much, because you can hear his voice in your heart; the same way you can hear a song in your head even if there isn't a radio playing; the same way you can hear those blackbirds flying when they're not in the sky
Adam Rapp
Pull yourself out of yourself so that you can replace yourself with the universe itself! When somebody knocks your door, if you are not there, the universe will open the door! Wisdom is to make yourself to fly away from yourself! When you leave yourself, there won’t be any emptiness left inside you, because universe will immediately flow into that emptiness!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You will face yourself again in a moment of terror and will learn once again that old lesson you keep forgetting: that you can escape from anywhere, but you cannot flee your own self.
Mihail Sebastian
Meanwhile the temperature is getting hotter and hotter so no one can think clearly. No one perceives. No one cares. Insane madness come out like life is a terrific party.
Kathy Acker
When its 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When its 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it's still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles.
Neil Simon
Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.
Irwin Shaw
Give my regards to Broadway,Remember me to Herald Square,Tell all the gang at 42nd Street,That I will soon be there;Whisper of how I'm yearningTo mingle with the old time throng,Give my regards to old Broadway,And say that I'll be there e'er long.
George M. Cohan
Everything in New York is a photograph. All the things that are supposed to be dirty or rough or unrefined are the most beautiful things. Garbage cans at the ends of alleyways look like they've been up all night talking with each other. Doorways with peeling paint look like the wise lines around an old feller's eyes. I stop and stare but can't stay because men always think I'm selling something. Or worse, giving something away. I wish I could be invisible. Or at least I wish I didn't look like someone they want to look at. They stop being part of the picture, they get up from their chess game and come out of the frame at me, blocking my view.
Ann-Marie MacDonald
O! how shall summer's honey breath hold out, / Against the wrackful siege of battering days?
William Shakespeare
When the winter comes, the summer shines infinitely in our hearts!
Mehmet Murat ildan
DaffodowndillyShe wore her yellow sun-bonnet, She wore her greenest gown;She turned to the south wind And curtsied up and down.She turned to the sunlight And shook her yellow head,And whispered to her neighbor: "Winter is dead.
A.A. Milne
Don’t forget the snow in the summertime, because you will meet him again when the summer is over!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Summer's lease hath all too short a date.
William Shakespeare
It was a girl playing a harp, like in an orchestra. It was in this tree at our campsite. And since it was breezy weather that weekend, the girl's arms were almost always turning.
Paul Fleischman
There was the girl, screaming like an angry bird,When it finds its nest left empt and little ones gone." - Sentry
Sophocles
You can’t get the taste of winning in a running competition with a turtle!
Mehmet Murat ildan
One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
Oscar Wilde
They must take me for a fool, or even worse, a lunatic. And no wonder ,for I am so intensely conscious of my misfortune and my misery is so overwhelming that I am powerless to resist it and am being turned into stone, devoid of all knowledge or feeling.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
What greater evil could you wish a miser than long life?
Syrus Publilius
He was pinched perspinngly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions to problems he was unwilling to dismiss as unsolvable. He was never without misery, and never without hope.
Joseph Heller
I'm awful at hiding it when I'm miserable. Sometimes I think if I were better at it maybe I'd be able to fool myself. Trick the misery right out of me.
Kara Lee Corthron
If Iona's heart were to burst and his misery to flow out, it would flood the whole world, it seems, but yet it is not seen. It has found a hiding-place in such an insignificant shell that one would not have found it with a candle by daylight....
Anton Chekhov
The leading lady had a large and saving sense of humor. But there is nothing that blunts the sense of humor more quickly than a few months of one-night stands. Even O. Henry could have seen nothing funny about that room.
Edna Ferber
Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.
Samuel Beckett
A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.
Joseph Addison
When we our betters see bearing our woes,We scarcely think our miseries our foes.
William Shakespeare
The word "Christian" means 'like Christ'! We are to reflect His beauty, do His deeds, think His thoughts, and speak His words. This is what it means to become conformed into the image of Jesus Christ. Do we really understand to what we are committing ourselves when we sing the song 'To be like Jesus...All I ask, to be like Him'? Actually, we are asking for everything that Jesus is: His character, His work, His mind, His word, His beauty, power, wisdom, and will. This is a big order, but it is our destiny! This is what life is all about. To miss this is to miss everything. To gain this is to possess the answer to life's biggest question. Christ is the answer! God planned it so. The will of God the Father for you centers in His Son!
Robert C. Frost
In attitude, faith is "restful", but in action, it is "powerful". Praying in tongues has both a restful and powerful effect upon our lives because it is an active expression of our faith.
Robert C. Frost
The universe we are living in is not suitable for waiting for anything! Stop waiting and leave your port!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I find waiting unbearable because it makes me passive and negates me. I hate being nothing.
Kathy Acker
Waiting insistently in front of a tightly closed door is unfair to all of the open doors! Give a chance to the open doors!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Our universe is not suitable for waiting. This universe is a ‘we must do something universe,’ it is a ‘we must be serious universe!’ Think fast, think right and implement your thoughts very fast! To survive in this universe, ‘waiting’ must be abolished!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You are waiting for something good to come; but you know, if the life is also waiting, then nothing will happen, nothing will come!
Mehmet Murat ildan
That...that was how I spent the day, just waiting, waiting, waiting...but waiting like a man running amok, senselessly, like an animal, with that headlong, direct persistance.
Stefan Zweig
Sometimes it is not right to wait for the right train. Take any train instead of rotting at the station! In other words, be realistic!
Mehmet Murat ildan