Quotes by Playwrights - Page 55

Love ... was part imagination, its web spun as much in the dark lonely separated evenings of longing as in the shared times together.
Niall Williams
I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.
Cormac McCarthy
In the Village IIIWho has removed the typewriter from my desk,so that I am a musician without his pianowith emptiness ahead as clear and grotesqueas another spring? My veins bud, and I am sofull of poems, a wastebasket of black wire.The notes outside are visible; sparrows willline antennae like staves, the way springs were,but the roofs are cold and the great grey riverwhere a liner glides, huge as a winter hill,moves imperceptibly like the accumulatingyears. I have no reason to forgive herfor what I brought on myself. I am past hating,past the longing for Italy where blowing snowabsolves and whitens a kneeling mountain rangeoutside Milan. Through glass, I am waitingfor the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginningof spring, but my hands, my work, feel strangewithout the rusty music of my machine. No wordsfor the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mangeof old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds.
Derek Walcott
Looking from the window at the fantastic light and colour of my glittering fairy-world of fact that holds no tenderness, no quietude, I long suddenly for peace, for understanding.
Daphne du Maurier
Benvolio: What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?Romeo: Not having that, which, having, makes them short.
William Shakespeare
He had fallen into the error of all liberals: the belief that men are prepared to reform themselves, that good will attracts good will, that truth has leavening virtue of its own.
Morris West
I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.
Cormac McCarthy
The very act of writing then, conjuring/coming to 'see', what has yet to be recorded in history is to bring into consciousness what only the body knows to be true. The body - that site which houses the intuitive, the unspoken, the viscera of our being - this is the revolutionary promise of "theory in the flesh
Cherríe L. Moraga
After Jacob had worked for Laban for seven years, do you know what happened? Laban fooled him and gave him his ugly daughter Leah. So to marry Rachel, Jacob was forced to work another seven years.So, you see, children, the Bible clearly teaches us you can never trust an employer.
Joseph Stein
He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism. But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word “Fascism” and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson.
Sinclair Lewis
Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope.
Joseph Heller
True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?
Václav Havel
Himself an ugly man, insignificantof appearance, he prized very highly comeliness in others.
W Somerset Maugham
A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr.
T.S Eliot
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
W Somerset Maugham
You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.
Tom Stoppard
He was always running or bounding, never just walking. He seemed always at the point of defeating the law of gravity.
Tennessee Williams
Don’t wait for anyone to push you up, push yourself up; don’t wait for anyone to pull you up, pull yourself up! Your best hero, your greatest savior is yourself! The candle of your darkness is hidden within you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
No hero is a hero if he ever killed someone! Only the man who has not any blood in his hand can be a real hero! The honour of being a hero belongs exclusively to the peaceful people!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Lice consume grass, rust consumes iron, and lying the soul!
Anton Chekhov
Romeo: I dreamt a dream tonight.Mercutio: And so did I.Romeo: Well, what was yours?Mercutio: That dreamers often lie.
William Shakespeare
While I think of it, Mr. Werle, junior — don't use that foreign word: ideals. We have the excellent native word: lies.
Henrik Ibsen
When you take pictures of nature with passion, nature poses for you more passionately!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckettas told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett
Samuel Beckett
A giant once lived in that body. But Matt Brady got lost. Because he was looking for God too high up and too far away.
Jerome Lawrence
He weighs the volume in his hand; this one has been the center of the whirlwind. Then DRUMMOND notices the Bible on the JUDGE's bench. He picks up the Bible in his other hand; he looks from one volume to the other, balancing them thoughtfully, as if his hands were scales. He half-smiles, half-shrugs. Then DRUMMOND slaps the two books together and jams them in his brief case, side by side. Slowly, he climbs to the street level and crosses the empty square.
Jerome Lawrence
Why? Because I refuse to erase a man's lifetime? I tell you Brady had the same right as Cates: the right to be wrong!
Jerome Lawrence
It's kind of spooky when you are caught talking to God everybody thinks you're nuts. They used to call you a prophet.
Paul Zindel
When you sit tranquilly, you set a great example to the people who rush around in panic and thus you show the crazy waves the beauty of being a calm lake!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Hungry Joe was crazy, and no one knew it better than Yossarian, who did everything he could to help him. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen to Yossarian. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen because he thought Yossarian was crazy
Joseph Heller
I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young.And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t quite see the street you were in, and didn’t quite hear everything that was said to you.You’re just a little bit crazy. Will you remember that, please?
Thornton Wilder
A beautiful poem is like a beautiful sky and a beautiful sky is like a beautiful poem!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If you always look at the sky, you miss the good things on the ground; if you always look at the ground, you miss the good things in the sky!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Once I really looked at the sky, I wanted to go on looking; it seemed to draw me towards it and make me listen hard, though there was nothing to listen to, not so much as a twig was stirring.
Dodie Smith
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;I 'most could touch it with my hand!And reaching up my hand to try,I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.
Daphne du Maurier
...[P]erhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return---that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness.
Dodie Smith
Let no one who loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.
J.M. Barrie
It is glorious fun racing down the Hump, but you can't do it on windy days because then you are not there, but the fallen leaves do it instead of you. There is almost nothing that has such a keen sense of fun as a fallen leaf.
J.M. Barrie
I didn't want to spent a lot of close time with someone who believed that fun is a bourgeois indulgence.
Howard Zinn
And I was having too much fun to stop now.
Jeff Lindsay
You can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count.
A.A. Milne
Another question I am frequently asked is, "What do you mean by recovery?" It has taken me a while to answer that one. I had been depending on other people's definitions of recovery until I developed one that worked for me (just as you must come to one that makes sense for you.) Mine is simple. For me, it is about fre
Mike Lew
I've allowed myself to lead this little life, when inside me there was so much more.
Willy Russell
Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them
Oscar Wilde
Colonel Cargill, General Peckem’s troubleshooter, was a forceful, ruddy man. Before the war he had been an alert, hard-hitting, aggressive marketing executive. He was a very bad marketing executive. Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and opened every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.
Joseph Heller
Scotland can exist fully if we dream hard enough, Julie. I just can’t relate to that Scottish deep-fried-chip-on-the-shoulder. Trainspotting was wrong: it feels fucking great being Scottish. We’re becoming something, Julie. I can feel it. We’re getting dressed up.
Alan Bissett
Such a lot is won when even a single man gets to his feet and says No
Bertolt Brecht
What women are concerned in is developing their own individuality, and hence they refuse to call any man master, be he husband or spiritual guide. Personal freedom is more precious to them than the protection of the best men. The women they envy are not those who are simply wives and mothers, but those who by honest intelligent work have attained distinction in any line of effort, and whose creed has been self-reliance.
Neith Boyce
Water on earth came from space. Everything which is there was once upon a time not there and everything which is there shall return again to wherever they come from! When you see a beautiful ocean, or beautiful anything, remember this and appreciate them well!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.
Yukio Mishima
He rose and turned toward the lights of town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
Cormac McCarthy
All we can hope for is that he will fall into the ocean with a bar of soap in his pocket.
Eoin Colfer
…And the sound of the sea, like the wild-animal breath of the world itself, frightened them as it gasped and died at their feet.
Leonardo Sciascia
Can you imagine a waveless ocean while there is a big storm outside? And that calm ocean is the ocean of wisdom!
Mehmet Murat ildan
An ocean which thinks there is nothing to learn from a lake is not a wise ocean!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The children had had an argument once about whether there was more grass in the world or more sand, and Roger said that of course there must be more sand because of under the sea; in every ocean all over the world there would be sand, if you looked deep down. But there could be grass too, argued Deborah, a waving grass, a grass that nobody had ever seen, and the colour of that ocean grass would be darker than any grass on the surface of the world, in fields or prairies or people's gardens in America. It would be taller than tress and it would move like corn in the wind. ("The Pool
Daphne du Maurier
They were frisky, eager and exuberant, and they had all been friends in the States. They were plainly unthinkable. They were noisy, overconfident, empty-headed kids of twenty-one. They had gone to college and were engaged to pretty, clean girls whose pictures were already standing on the rough cement mantelpiece of Orr's fireplace. They had ridden in speedboats and played tennis. They had been horseback riding. One had once been to bed with an older woman. They knew the same poeple in different parts of the country and had gone to school with each other's cousins.
Joseph Heller
From this day to the ending of the world,But we in it shall be remembered-We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;For he to-day that sheds his blood with meShall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,This day shall gentle his condition;And gentlemen in England now-a-bedShall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaksThat fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
William Shakespeare
Eighteen pockets in one suit? I haven't the time.
A.A. Milne