Quotes by Playwrights - Page 95

AUNT SHADIE:I see you - and don't worry, you're not white.ROSE:I'm pretty sure I'm white. I'm English.AUNT SHADIE:White is blindness - it has nothing to do with the colour of your skin.
Marie Clements
Was insanity really easier to accept than unconsciousness?
Jeff Lindsay
I just want to be loved, is that so wrong?!
Harvey Fierstein
For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.
Gertrude Stein
I remind you that I have no faith. If I sought God, I find myself.
Henry de Montherlant
Do not believe that you alone can be right.The man who thinks that,The man who maintains that only he has the powerTo reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul—A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty.
Sophocles
Reason is God's crowning gift to man, and you are rightTo warn me against losing mine. I cannot say—I hope that I shall never want to say!— that youHave reasoned badly. Yet there are other menWho can reason, too; and their opinions might be helpful.You are not in a position to know everythingThat people say or do, or what they feel:Your temper terrifies them—everyoneWill tell you only what you like to hear.
Sophocles
Take these things to heart, my son, I warn you.All men make mistakes, it is only human.But once the wrong is done, a mancan turn his back on folly, misfortune too,if he tries to make amends, however low he's fallen,and stops his bullnecked ways. Stubbornnessbrands you for stupidity - pride is a crime.
Sophocles
The nobility of England would have snored through the Sermon on the Mount. But you'll labor like scholars over a bulldog's pedigree.
Robert Bolt
Let us thank God for valour in abstractionFor those who go their own way, will not kissThe arse of law and order nor compoundFor physical comfort at the price of pride
Louis MacNeice
It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.
Graham Greene
i found god in myself& i loved her/ i loved her fiercely
Ntozake Shange
For when a woman resists an unwelcome passion, she is obeying to the full the law of her sex; the initial gesture of refusal is, so to speak, a primordial instinct in every female, and even if she rejects the most ardent passion she cannot be called inhuman. But how disastrous it is when fate upsets the balance, when a woman so far overcomes her natural modesty as to disclose her passion to a man, when, without the certainty of its being reciprocated, she offers her love, and he, the wooed, remains cold and on the defensive! An insoluble tangle this, always; for not to return a woman's love is to shatter her pride, to violate her modesty. The man who rejects a woman's advances is bound to wound her in her noblest feelings. In vain, then, all the tenderness with which he extricates himself, useless all his polite, evasive phrases, insulting all his offers of mere friendship, once she has revealed her weakness! His resistance inevitably becomes cruelty, and in rejecting a woman's love he takes a load of guild upon his conscience, guiltless though he may be. Abominable fetters that can never be cast off!
Stefan Zweig
. . . I will not be sworn, but love may trans-form me to an oyster, but, I’ll take my oath on it, till hehave made an oyster of me, he shall never make me sucha fool.
William Shakespeare
Love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
It was one of the links between the ground-down poor and the wasteful rich. The girl felt that even if she had less than anybody in Williamsburg, somehow she had more. She was richer because she had something to waste.
Betty Smith
But if we reason it out simply and not try to be one bit fancy, then what sort of pride can you possibly take or what's the sense of ever having it, if man is poorly put together as a physiological type and if the enormous majority of the human race is brutal, stupid, and profoundly unhappy?
Anton Chekhov
He that is proud eats up himself: pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle.
William Shakespeare
He hesitated till the last moment, but finally dropped them in the box, saying, "I shall win!"--the cry of a gambler, the cry of the great general, the compulsive cry that has ruined more men than it has ever saved.
Honoré de Balzac
It’s the oldest story in the world. You want him back, don’t you?
Larry Kramer
No man thinks the same story when looking at a photo because every mind lived a different story!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Itdoes not need much wisdom to utter words of reproof; but much wisdomis needed to find such words as do not embitter a man's misfortune, butencourage him, restore to him his spirit, put spurs to the horse of hissoul, refreshed by water.
Nikolai Gogol
And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of [the strangers'] smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had the power to heal men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted.
Cormac McCarthy
This time, Fusako was able to express herself with fluency and candor. The bold letters she had been writing week after week had granted her an unexpected new freedom.
Yukio Mishima
There are no commitments, only bargains. And they have to be made again every day. You think making a commitment is it. Finish. You think it sets like a concrete platform and it'll take any strain you want to put on it. You're committed. You don't have to prove anything. In fact you can afford a little neglect, indulge in a little bit of sarcasm here and there, isolate yourself when you want to. Underneath it's concrete for life. I'm a cow in some ways, but you're an idiot.
Tom Stoppard
We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbors. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself.
W Somerset Maugham
What the dead had no speech for, when living,They can tell you, being dead: the communicationOf the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T.S Eliot
Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.
Graham Greene
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
George Bernard Shaw
I grant men the land, the government, the wealth, all the chances. I accept that you have to hold all the cards, since that's the only way you know how to play; but I refuse to swallow your disrespect.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.
Oscar Wilde
you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity.
Oscar Wilde
I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.
Lillian Hellman
Any titles, money, or privilege you inherit are actually hindrances. They delude you into believing you are owed respect.
Robert Greene
I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.
George Bernard Shaw
There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age. I missed it coming and going.
J.B. Priestley
Everyone likes everything nowadays. They like the television and the phonograph and the shampoo and the soda pop and the Cracker Jack. Everything becomes everything else and it's all nice and pretty and LIKABLE. Everything is fun in the sun! Where's the discernment? Where's the arbitration that separates what I LIKE from what I RESPECT, what I deem WORTHY, what has... listen to me now... SIGNIFICANCE.
John Logan
I respect him. He has brains and character; and that, I may tell you, is a very unusual combination.
W Somerset Maugham
Well, young man, have you found anyone worthy of your respect?"Artemis smiled back. "Yes," he said. "I believe I have.
Eoin Colfer
Beauty works perfect miracles. All inner shortcomings in a beauty, instead of causing repugnance, become somehow extraordinarily attractive; vice itself breathes comeliness in them; but if it were to disappear, then a woman would have to be twenty times more intelligent than a man in order to inspire, if not love, at least respect.
Nikolai Gogol
If you want to be respected, do something respectful!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Don't you try and go through life worrying about if somebody like you or not. You best be making sure they doing right by you.
August Wilson
You can always be better than your master but you can never change the fact that you were his student and he was your master! The seed must always respect for his soil!
Mehmet Murat ildan
There is only one way to be a respectful being and the way for this is very simple: Respect other beings!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Respect the hand stronger than your hand if and only if that hand is just and an honourable hand!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You can stay here with your papa and die or you can go with me.... You'll be all right.
Cormac McCarthy
The choice is very obvious if you have to choose between the devil and the angel! If the choice is not obvious in your mind, then you have some badnesses inside you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If you see many paths before you, don't be afraid; if you see only one path before you, then be afraid because choice means freedom and no choice means slavery!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Which gate to enter? Which path to choose? Which stairs to take? Which direction to go? These questions can be very depressive! And sometimes the solution lies in being bold, in being imprudent!
Mehmet Murat ildan
In this world one is seldom reduced to make a selection between two alternatives. There are as many varieties of conduct and opinion as there are turns of feature between an aquiline nose and a flat one.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Choose well. Your choice is brief, and yet endless.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I dare say it is rather hard to be a rat,” she mused. “Nobody likes you. People jump and run away and scream out: ‘Oh, a horrid rat!’ I shouldn’t like people to scream and jump and say: ‘Oh, a horrid Sara!’ the moment they saw me, and set traps for me, and pretend they were dinner. It’s so different to be a sparrow. But nobody asked this rat if he wanted to be a rat when he was made. Nobody said: ‘Wouldn’t you rather be a sparrow?
Frances Hodgson Burnett
There's small choice in rotten apples.
William Shakespeare
No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.
Knut Hamsun
The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return - that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness.
Dodie Smith
Now that lilacs are in bloomShe has a bowl of lilacs in her roomAnd twists one in her fingers while she talks."Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not knowWhat life is, you who hold it in your hands"; (slowly twisting the lilac stalks)"You let it flow from you, you let it flow,And youth is cruel, and has no remorseAnd smiles at situations which it cannot see."I smile, of course,And go on drinking tea.
T.S Eliot
‎She was not a little girl heart-broken about him; she was a grown woman smiling at it all, but they were wet smiles.
J.M. Barrie
Orsino: For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won,Than women's are. ...For women are as roses, whose fair flow'rBeing once display'd doth fall that very hour.Viola: And so they are; alas, that they are so!To die, even when they to perfection grow!
William Shakespeare
such wanton, wild, and usual slips/ As are companions noted and most known/ To youth and liberty.
William Shakespeare
It’s hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they’re disappointed if we can’t share their surprise when they have discovered that a hen lays an egg. There’s a lot of nonsense in their ranting and raving, but it’s not all nonsense. One ought to sympathize with them; one ought to do one’s best to understand. One has to remember how much has to be forgotten and how much has to be learnt when for the first time one faces life. It’s not very easy to give up one’s ideals, and the brute facts of every day are bitter pills to swallow. The spiritual conflicts of adolescence can be very severe and one can do little to resolve them.
W Somerset Maugham