Quotes by Playwrights - Page 84

He that would govern others first should be master of himself.
Philip Massinger
How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scares by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred - by economic inequity - faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices.
Howard Zinn
Ah remember walkin along Princes Street wi Spud, we both hate walkin along that hideous street, deadened by tourists and shoppers, the twin curse ay modern capitalism.
Irvine Welsh
She was willing a little bit of sweated labour, incapable of betraying the slogan of her slavers, that since the customer or sucker was paying for his gutrot ten times what it cost to produce and five times what it cost to fling in his face, it was only reasonable to defer to his complaints up to but not exceeding fifty per cent of his exploitation.
Samuel Beckett
You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you.
Oscar Wilde
I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.
Oscar Wilde
Mr. Disney, we are returning your Duck. Feathers plucked and well-roasted. Look inside, you can see the handwriting on the wall, our hands still writing on the wall: Donald, Go Home!
Ariel Dorfman
Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power than can transform the world.
Howard Zinn
I remember a time when a cabbage could sell itself by being a cabbage. Nowadays it’s no good being a cabbage – unless you have an agent and pay him a commission. Nothing is free anymore to sell itself or give itself away. These days, Countess, every cabbage has its pimp.
Jean Giraudoux
The advantage of having an artistic tradition is that the younger artist could see an organic link between the real life of one's country and its art work which is a sublimation of that life.
Kuo Pao Kun
The mob not only grabs hold of art without being entitled to do so, but it also enters the artist. It takes up residence inside the artist and smashes a few holes in the wall, windows to the outer world: The mob wants to be seen.
Elfriede Jelinek
The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?
William Saroyan
A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent
Oscar Wilde
Her body is one big refrigerator, where Art is well stored.
Elfriede Jelinek
A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.
Gertrude Stein
I understand that in our work - doesn't matter whether it's acting or writing - what's important isn't fame or glamour, none of the things I used to dream about, it's the ability to endure.
Anton Chekhov
The machines are too dull when weare lion-poems that move & breathe.
Michael McClure
The Ph.D is one of the chosen who know that some things can never be fathomed, no matter how hard you try. What good are explanations? There is no possibility of explaining how such a work [Mozart's Requiem, in the instance] could ever have come into being. (The same holds true for certain poems, which should not be analyzed either.)
Elfriede Jelinek
Beyond the YearsI the years the answer lies,Beyond where brood the grieving skies And Night drops tears.Where Faith rod-chastened smiles to rise And doff its fears,And carping Sorrow pines and dies— Beyond the years.IIBeyond the years the prayer for restShall beat no more within the breast; The darkness clears,And Morn perched on the mountain's crest Her form uprears—The day that is to come is best, Beyond the years.IIIBeyond the years the soul shall findThat endless peace for which it pined, For light appears,And to the eyes that still were blind With blood and tears,Their sight shall come all unconfined Beyond the years.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Oh, there are no living poets, Miss Van Damn. We're not entirely sure there ever were. They've found some shreds of sonnets in England and, embedded in a chalk wall of a cave in France, some yet undetermined thing which might be the legendary inward eye. But all evidence, such as it is, suggests that, if there ever were poets, they were all burned into extinction during the interglacial period of despair.
Paddy Chayefsky
The attention was flattering. For the first five minutes. Now I know how poems feel.
Margaret Edson
I believe that poems die the moment they are outwardly expressed.
Maurice Maeterlinck
There occurs the beautiful feeling that only humanity together is the true human being, and that the individual can be cheerful and happy only if he has the courage to feel himself in the Whole.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What if, instead of being afraid of even talking about death, we saw our lives in some ways as preparation for it.What if we were taught to ponder it and reflect on it and talk about it and enter it and rehearse it and try it on?What if, rather than being cast out and defined by some terminal category, you were identified as someone in the middle of a transformation that could deepen your soul, open your heart, and all the while-even if and particularly when you were dying-you would be supported by and be part of a community?
Eve Ensler
You will touch this joy and you will suddenly know it is what you were looking for your whole life, but you were afraid to even acknowledge the absence because the hunger for it was so encompassing.
Eve Ensler
I had never read a book written by an African-American. I didn't know that black people could write books. I didn't know that blacks had done any great things. I was always conscious of my inferiority and I always remembered my place - until the Civil Rights Movement came to the town where I was born and grew up.
Endesha Ida Mae Holland
Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordinary night when Paul Dempster was born? I am pretty sure that my little sketch of Percy Boyd Staunton is accurate, but what about myself? I have always sneered at autobiographies and memoirs in which the writer appears at the beginning as a charming, knowing little fellow, possessed of insights and perceptions beyond his years, yet offering these with false naivete to the reader, as though to say, 'What a little wonder I was, but All Boy.' Have the writers any notion or true collection of what a boy is?I have and I have reinforced it by forty-five years of teaching boys. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. Oh these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths!Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born.
Robertson Davies
To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever serve that they should have ben born.
W Somerset Maugham
A garden is never finished. In that sense it is like the human world and all human undertakings.
Karel Čapek
It’s only when we can work with something that brings out our strengths that we’re of any real use.
Henning Mankell
It was possible in this wonderful city for that nameless little boy -for any of its millions- to have a decent chance to scale the walls and achieve what they wished. Wealth, rank or an imposing name counted for nothing. The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.
Moss Hart
The likelihood of meeting anyone who wouldn't make him feel even lonelier seemed increasingly remote. Life was a dwindling process now, not a building proposition. He couldn't imagine being with someone new, opening up, feeling appreciated and understood, without having to explain his dubious non sequiturs and increasingly arcane or redundant frame of reference.
Peter Nichols
I'm attracted to difficulty, I think. I'm attracted to guys who have truckloads of baggage. With them, it will never, ever be simple. And then they do or say one little magical thing and they own me.
Kara Lee Corthron
I'll read enoughWhen I do see the very book indeedWhere all my sins are writ, and that's myself.Give me that glass and therein will I read.No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath sorrow struckSo many blows upon this face of mineAnd made no deeper wounds?O flattering glass,Like to my followers in prosperityThou dost beguile me!
William Shakespeare
Frailty, thy name is woman!—A little month, or ere those shoes were oldWith which she follow'd my poor father's body,Like Niobe, all tears:—
William Shakespeare
A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him, ‘Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?’ And the sage answered him, ‘Precisely for that reason—because it does not avail.
Miguel de Unamuno
For sorrow ends not, when it seemeth done.
William Shakespeare
It is but sorrow to be wise when wisdom profits not.
Sophocles
Every sorrow and every pain is a good reminding to us to be serious because we are living in a dangerous universe!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Keep your heart infinitesimally small and sorrow will never spy it, never plunge, never flap away with your heart in her claws.
Emma Donoghue
Do you remember your first real teacher? Your first real teacher is your first sorrow, your first crying!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Many a month of gloomy unconsciousness rolled over me, without date or notice. One thousand waves may welter over a sunk wreck, and be felt as one.
Charles Robert Maturin
Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things
Oscar Wilde
Am I kin to Sorrow,That so oftFalls the knocker of my door—Neither loud nor soft,But as long accustomed—Under Sorrow’s hand?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sorrow like a ceaseless rainBeats upon my heart.People twist and scream in pain,—Dawn will find them still again;This has neither wax nor wane,Neither stop nor start.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world’s sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer.
Oscar Wilde
The shadow of my sorrow. Let's see, 'tis very true. My griefs lie all within and these external manners of laments are mere shadows to the unseen grief which swells with silence in the tortured soul.There lies the substance.
William Shakespeare
She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.
Cormac McCarthy
A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.
Françoise Sagan
Estragon: They're too bigVladimir: Perhaps you'll have socks some day
Samuel Beckett
Growing up is such a barbarous business, full of inconvenience... and pimples.
J.M. Barrie
You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up. In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than the other girls.
J.M. Barrie
There are many you’s within you, but all of them are still you! You are nothing but different you’s!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Sweet are the uses of adversity,Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;And this our life, exempt from public haunt,Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
William Shakespeare
When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong--or absolutely right.
Albert Guinon
Sweet are the uses of adversity.
William Shakespeare
Difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
Sweet are the uses of adversityWhich, like the toad, ugly and venomous,Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
William Shakespeare
O, that's a brave man! He writes brave verses, speaks brave words, swears brave oaths, and breaks them bravely,
William Shakespeare
O, that's a brave man! He writes brave versrs, speaks brave words, swears brave oaths, and breaks them bravely,
William Shakespeare