Quotes by Playwrights - Page 93

Woody Allen once said that ‘I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.’ This is certainly a very wise wish! Whoever grasped the triviality of anything besides the existence is a wise man indeed! There is no substitute for life!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you’re forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you’re genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don’t speak, why you don’t move, why you’ve created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you’ve left your other parts one by one.
Ingmar Bergman
When I strip away my dreams, what I imagine to be my potential, all the things I haven't said, what I imagine I feel for other people in the absence of my expressing it, all the rules I've made for myself that I don't follow--I see that I've done as little as anyone else in this world to deserve the grand moniker I.
Sheila Heti
The key to the scientist's purpose is the idea that every phenomenon is the product of a certain given set of condition. In his laboratory he hopes to reconstitute the set of conditions, however complex they may be, which, once they are fully reconstituted, cannot fail to give rise to the phenomenon he is after, life. In other words he seeks to start off a mechanically fated chain-reaction; and of course, in enumerating the conditions that have made it possible for him to manufacture his phenomenon he systematically discounts the huge mental toils, the plodding, methodical research, of himself and others.Thus, by a singular contradiction, he succeeds in convincing himself and, of course, attempts to persuade others, that he has arrived at the origin of his phenomenon; he sets out to demonstrate that everything in the universe runs perfectly smoothly by itself, without any creative power at anytime intruding.
Gabriel Marcel
This instant which I cannot leave, which locks me in and limits me on every side, this instant I am made of will be no more than a confused dream.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Even in the saddest moments of life, the happiness of simply being, the joy of just having existence must be remembered strongly!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Books fashion nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.
Fay Weldon
Nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.
Stefan Zweig
I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I will say nothing... against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To smile is to turn the lights on, the lights of existence within you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Only knowledge can turn life's unbearableness into a weapon.
Yukio Mishima
Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are to accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.
Yukio Mishima
Remember that existence comes before the happiness and thus to exist is more important than to be happy!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Hold the Earth tightly and fondly because you owe your existence to the Earth!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature, In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuses behind us, no justification before us. We are alone with no excuses.This is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet in other respects is free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
Jean-Paul Sartre
His head was pounding and his vision skewed in some way and he was vaguely amazed at being alive and not sure that it was worth it.
Cormac McCarthy
Everything which helps us to exist is holy! And a tree is holiest of the holy for us!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Find a calm lake and wait for the twilight in silence! There, existence will visit you with all its magnificence! The existence of the Existence can best be felt in the presence of dimness and in the absence of crowds and noises!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What job a fascinating view does, apart from fascinating you? It does this: It perfectly motivates you to love existence much more than you can love!
Mehmet Murat ildan
In one form or the other, the quest for human dignity has proved to be one of the most propulsive elements for wars, civil strife and willing sacrifice. Yet the entitlement to dignity, enshrined among the 'human rights', does not aspire to being the most self-evident, essential need for human survival, such as food, or physical health. Compared to that other candidate for the basic impulse of human existence - self-preservation - it may even be deemed self-indulgent.
Wole Soyinka
We always look for everything in the immediate proximity, that is a mistake.
Thomas Bernhard
Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.
Yukio Mishima
Close your eyes because all the great sounds of existence can best be heard with eyes shut!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Who can live without eating? A farmer is a great hero because he fights for our existence! If anyone deserves a medal of existence in a country, that person should be a farmer!
Mehmet Murat ildan
And the existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life.
Anton Chekhov
The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before.
Herman Wouk
I murmur: "It's a seat," a little like an exorcism. But the word stays on my lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing. It stays what it is, with its red plush, thousands of little red paws in the air, all still, little dead paws. This enormous belly turned upward, bleeding, inflated—bloated with all its dead paws, this belly floating in this car, in this grey sky, is not a seat. It could just as well be a dead donkey tossed about in the water, floating with the current, belly in the air in a great grey river, a river of floods; and I could be sitting on the donkey's belly, my feet dangling in the clear water.
Jean-Paul Sartre
You were right," said the Master impressed by the neatness of Korovyov's work, "when you said: no documents, no person. So that means I don't exist since I don't have any documents.
Mikhail Bulgakov
Leaving a place, a person or a country silently and without any notice is a heroic and a noble way of teaching the importance of your presence to those who ignore your existence!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Let us proceed under the assumption that the fairy folk do exist, and that I am not a gibbering moron.
Eoin Colfer
I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The original Gothic horror tales focused on personalities deformed through loneliness. Ghouls, vampires, werewolves: all made, not born. But the isolation? Are even such as these ever truly alone? Perhaps the psyche has always been more complex than that, desire eternally more potent than terror. Surely, none prowl entirely in solitude.
Robert Dunbar
I made a gift for you, Good Proctor. I had to sit long hours in a chair, and passed the time with sewing." - Mary Warren
Arthur Miller
I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing
Cormac McCarthy
To say something great, you must first stop trying to say something great! Sometimes struggling is an obstacle to reach the target! Flow like a river, calmly, naturally, enjoying the present moment, without thinking of the ocean and finally you will be there!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The expedition of my violent love outrun the pauser, reason.
William Shakespeare
We need more windows for the houses. And for men, more reason!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Use your own reason to find the truth. And to do this, you must first get rid of the myths that your culture injected to your brain!
Mehmet Murat ildan
... reason andlove keep little company together now-a-days...
William Shakespeare
Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.
Maurice Maeterlinck
... and yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days...
William Shakespeare
Were such things here as we do speak about?Or have we eaten on the insane rootThat takes the reason prisoner?
William Shakespeare
When you feel you are badly falling into the emptiness, stick to the reason , stick to the logic; they will reverse the situation!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Our reasons are not prophets When oft our fancies are.
William Shakespeare
Alas! How sad when reasoners reason wrong.
Sophocles
One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
Oscar Wilde
When the tram has arrived at the stop, you have to be there! Calculate where a good opportunity will stop and be there!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The Moon always finds an opportunity to turn our attention from the ground beneath our feet to the sky above our head!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Opportunity is not a rock, it is a bird! You either catch it or you miss it!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Some beautiful opportunities are like birds. They may be there but only till the next second!
Mehmet Murat ildan
So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.
Sinclair Lewis
NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
Sinclair Lewis
Again, there were maidens who cherished the firm belief that he had come from the sea. Because within his breast could be heard the roaring of the sea. Because in the pupils of his eyes there lingered the mysterious and eternal horizon that the sea leaves as a keepsake deep in the eyes of all who are born at the seaside and forced to depart from it. Because his signs were sultry like the tidal breezes of full summer, fragrant with the smell of seaweed cast upon the shore.
Yukio Mishima
POLICEMAN. Good luck. (She finds it easiest just to nod in reply) I wish I was a Prince.
J.M. Barrie
Grant me one hour on love’s most sacred shoresTo clasp the bosom that my soul adores,Lie heart to heart and merge my soul with yours.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
Oscar Wilde
Let the romantic minds meet the romantic cities and after that the candle of romanticism shines on earth like a sun!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When did your namechange from a proper nounto a charm?Its three vowelslike jewelson the thread of my breath.Its consonantsbrushing my mouthlike a kiss.I love your name.I say it again and againin this summer rain.I see it,discreet in the alphabet,like a wish.I pray itinto the nighttill its letters are light.I hear your namerhyming, rhyming,rhyming with everything."Name
Carol Ann Duffy
Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head,so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllableslike a charm, like a spell.Falling in loveis glamorous hell; the crouched, parched heartlike a tiger ready to kill; a flame's fierce licks under the skin.Into my life, larger than life, beautiful, you strolled in. I hid in my ordinary days, in the long grass of routine,in my camouflage rooms. You sprawled in my gaze,staring back from anyone's face, from the shape of a cloud,from the pining, earth-struck moon which gapes at meas I open the bedroom door. The curtains stir. There you areon the bed, like a gift, like a touchable dream."You
Carol Ann Duffy