Quotes by Playwrights - Page 62

The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.
Ntozake Shange
The light on her face was a lesson, a book that she hoped he would want to read, but he looked away from her...she did not want this man to leave her alone. He was kind. And she feared the loneliness of dreaming
Caryl Phillips
I'm thinking 'tis only slaves do be giving heed to the day that's gone or the day to come.
Eugene O'Neill
The song just started again, and now I sang it, too. "These strong hands belong to you..." I found a place between two men. The first was about my age, maybe a little younger, with high cheekbones and small eyes. The other was middle-aged, with a wide forehead and bulb nose, and beside him was a man with a striking face, a square, dimpled chin and high cheekbones... and then there was another, and another--all the kinds of faces in all the colors the world calls black: brown and tan and yellow and orange, copper and bronze and gold. "These strong hands belong to you..." They sang--we sang--with no enthusiasm or joy. We used to sing at Bell's, crossing the yard or working on the pile, just like slaves used to sing in Old Slavery, spirituals and work songs, sly lyrics, silly lyrics, yearning for freedom or roasting Massa in nonsense words he couldn't understand. This, though--this was a different kind of singing. I looked from man to man, and they were singing mechanically, eyes front, mouths moving like puppets. Singing this dumb refrain about how much they loved their bosses and loved their work.Nothing spiritual about this. This was something else altogether.
Ben H. Winters
The quality of mercy is not strained;It droppeth as the gentle rain from heavenUpon the place beneath. It is twice blessed;It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomesThe throned monarch better than his crown; * * * * *It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;It is an attribute to God himself.
William Shakespeare
One day a year let’s all pretendthat death is tucked up, fast asleep.That no lives meet a tragic end,no dreams are shattered on the cheap.The world’s at peace, there are no wars,we hug our friend, our former foe.No beggars die outside locked doors,all cells are empty on death row.Nobody’s stabbed, nobody’s shot,no car runs over someone’s friend.This can’t be true! – Well, maybe not.All I’m saying is: let’s pretend.
Stig Dagerman
It was no time for mercy, it was time to terminate with extreme prejudice.
Eoin Colfer
The quality of mercy is not strain'd,It droppeth as the gentle rain from heavenUpon the place beneath: it is twice blest;It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomesThe throned monarch better than his crown;His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,The attribute to awe and majesty,Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;But mercy is above this sceptred sway;It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,It is an attribute to God himself;And earthly power doth then show likest God'sWhen mercy seasons justice.
William Shakespeare
Reflection ingeniously knows how to convert a beauty into a super beauty!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Where there is reflection, there is either double beauty or double ugliness!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The kingdom of reflection is at the mercy of the wind!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Gillman smiles, in the cold manner of an assassin. It's like looking in the mirror.
Irvine Welsh
But glad to have sat underThunder and rain with you,And grateful tooFor sunlight on the garden.
Louis MacNeice
When there is a beautiful reflection, we know not where to look, to the reflection or to the reflected!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The reflection is as real as the reflected till you touch it!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We don’t really communicate […]. We talk all right, talk in that strange language we’ve evolved for the purposes of avoiding communication. That non-language we’ve created. Perhaps it’s a sign that civilisation is regressing. Something is anyway.
Irvine Welsh
For the liquor of Miss Amelia has a special quality of its own. It is clean and sharp on the tongue, but once down a man it glows inside him for a long time afterward. And that is not all. It is known that if a message is written with lemon juice on a clean sheet of paper there will be no sign of it. But if the paper is held for a moment to the fire then the letters turn brown and the meaning becomes clear. Imagine that the whisky is the fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of a man – then the worth of Miss Amelia's liquor can be understood. Things that have gone unnoticed, thoughts that have been harbored far back in the dark mind, are suddenly recognized and comprehended. A spinner who has thought only of the loom, the dinner pail, the bed, and then the loom again – this spinner might drink some on a Sunday and come across a marsh lily. And in his palm he might hold this flower, examining the golden dainty cup, and in him suddenly might come a sweetness keen as pain. A weaver might look up suddenly and see for the first time the cold, weird radiance of midnight January sky, and a deep fright at his own smallness stop his heart. Such things as these, then, happen when a man has drunk Miss Amelia's liquor. He may suffer, or he may be spent with joy – but the experience has shown the truth; he has warmed his soul and seen the message hidden there.
Carson McCullers
Man lives in the midst of images. Literature offers him a critical image of himself.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Space is a windless silent place, just like the mind of a wise man!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Whenever I watch a documentary about the space, I find the news in the world very funny and dull!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We often think that earth is the ground where our houses are built; but scientifically saying, space is the ground and earth is the house built on that ground!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Tonight or every night if you wish you can have a very distinguished guest from the space: Just open your curtain at night, then the Moon will visit you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.
Miguel de Unamuno
Death is the ultimate negative.
Tom Stoppard
As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.
Tom Stoppard
You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. you see a women, you think that one day she'll be old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.
Jean-Paul Sartre
What are all the thoughts rattling in your mind when you're not listening to the answers to questions you ask?" -Jo, Boom
Peter Sinn Nachtrieb
Existence is tedious, anyway.
Anton Chekhov
With older people, it's quite different. They're reliable, they show you what to do, and there's solidity in their affection.
Jean-Paul Sartre
By dint of saying that I'm not alive, I accept the fact that people cease to regard me.
Jean Genet
Superfluity was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these hedges, these paths. Vainly I strove to compute the number of the chestnut trees, or their distance from the Velleda, or their height as compared with that of the plane trees; each of them escaped from the pattern I made for it, overflowed from it or withdrew. And I too among them, vile, languorous, obscene, chewing the cud of my thoughts, I too was superfluous. [I is you or I or anyone.] Luckily I did not feel it, I only understood it, but I felt uncomfortable because I was afraid of feeling it. . . . I thought vaguely of doing away with myself, to do away with at least one of these superfluous existences. But my death – my corpse, my blood poured out on this gravel, among these plants, in this smiling garden – would have been superfluous as well. I was superfluous to all eternity.
Jean-Paul Sartre
HAMM:Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?NAGG:I didn't know.HAMM:What? What didn't you know?NAGG:That it'd be you.(Pause.)
Samuel Beckett
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,To the last syllable of recorded time;And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death.- Macbeth Act V, Scene V
William Shakespeare
That's something we all want to know, isn't it? Is there a "purpose" to our form and substance? Or are we simply the random result of billions of years of chemical reactions and accidents influenced by pressures from the environment?..."-Jules, BOOM
Peter Sinn Nachtrieb
...freedom only gives you something to be sorry for.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Existentialism is no mournful delectation but a humanist philosophy of action, effort, combat, and solidarity. Man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines say what this man is before he dies, or what mankind is before it has disappeared.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I haven’t had any adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But not adventures. It isn’t a matter of words; I am beginning to understand. There is something I longed for more than all the rest - without realizing it properly. It wasn’t love, heaven forbid, nor glory, nor wealth. It was…anyway, I had imagined that at certain moments my life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: all I asked for was a little order. There is nothing very splendid about my life at present: but now and then, for example when they played music in the cafés, I would l look back and say to myself: in the old days, in London, Meknés, Tokyo, I have known wonderful moments, I have had adventures. It is that which has been taken away from me now. I have just learnt, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years. Adventures are in books. And naturally, everything they tell you about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It was to this way of happening that I attached so much importance.
Jean-Paul Sartre
You didn't succeed. Well, what of that? There's nothing to prove, you know, and the revolution's not a question of virtue but of effectiveness. There is no heaven. There's work to be done, that's all. And you must do what you're cut out for; all the better if it comes easy to you. The best work is not the work that takes the most sacrifice. It's the work in which you can best succeed.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.
Jean-Paul Sartre
What is there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off the inscription together with the gilding?
Anton Chekhov
[E]very man ought to say to himself, "Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?
Jean-Paul Sartre
I know by my own experience how, from a stranger met by chance, there may come an irresistible appeal which overturns the habitual perspectives just as a gust of wind might tumble down the panels of a stage set - what had seemed near becomes infinitely remote and what had seemed distant seems to be close.
Gabriel Marcel
Let us see what words can do. Will you understand me, for a start, if I tell you that I have never known what I am? My vices, my virtues, are under my nose, but I can’t see them, nor stand far enough back to view myself as a whole. I seem to be a sort of flabby mass in which words are engulfed; no sooner do I name myself than what is named is merged in him who names, and one gets no farther. I have often wanted to hate myself and, as you know, had good reasons for so doing. But my attempted hatred of myself was absorbed into my insubstantiality and was nothing but a recollection. I could not love myself either, I am sure, though I have never tried to. But I was eternally compelled to be myself; I was my own burden, but never burdensome enough, Mathieu. For one instant, on that June evening when I elected to confess to you, I thought I had encountered myself in your bewildered eyes.You saw me, in your eyes I was solid and predictable; my acts and moods were the actual consequences of a definite entity. And through me you knew that entity. I described it to you in my words, I revealed to you facts unknown to you, which had helped you to visualize it. And yet you saw it, I merely saw you seeing it. For one instant you were the heaven-sent mediator between me and myself, you perceived that compact and solid entity which I was and wanted to be in just as simple and ordinary a way as I perceived you. For, after all, I exist, I am, though I have no sense of being; and it is an exquisite torment to discover in oneself such utterly unfounded certainty, such unsubstantiated pride. I then understood that one could not reach oneself except through another’s judgment, another’s hatred. And also through another’s love perhaps; but there is here no question of that. For this revelation I am not ungrateful to you. I do not know how you would describe our present relations. Not goodwill, nor wholly hatred. Put it that there is a corpse between us. My corpse.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives.
Oscar Wilde
CLOV:Do you believe in the life to come?HAMM:Mine was always that.
Samuel Beckett
He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.
Graham Greene
There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore, it is madness. Alone I confront them and tell them that nothing could be saner or truer! What do people really know about life? We fall in line, follow the pattern established by our mentors. Everything is based on assumptions; even time, space, motion, matter are nothing but supposition. The world has no new knowledge to impart; it merely accepts what is there.
Knut Hamsun
What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Uncertainty is the normal state.
Tom Stoppard
All that is transitory is but a metaphor.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Nothingness haunts Being.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Tom Stoppard
I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me,and I have followed the source of rivers towards theirsource or plunged into forests, always making for othercities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; andI could never turn back any more than a record can spinin reverse. And all that was leading me where ?To this very moment...
Jean-Paul Sartre
The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.
Anton Chekhov
Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.
Jean-Paul Sartre