Quotes by Playwrights - Page 98

Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that one should live. If any love is shown us we should recognize that we are quite unworthy of it. Nobody is worthy to be loved... or if that phrase is a bitter one to bear, let us say that everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling..
Oscar Wilde
The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.
Oscar Wilde
It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it? Yes. It does. There's a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one. Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.
Cormac McCarthy
This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we've all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think?
Cormac McCarthy
Of course it was a terrible thing, and the world would be a much better place without someone in it who could do that, but did that mean we had to miss lunch?
Jeff Lindsay
I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it.
Cormac McCarthy
The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.
Oscar Wilde
If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Buying flowers is not just a way to bring home beauty. It's an expression of confidence that better days are coming. It's a defiant finger in the face of those naysayers who would have you believe your fortunes will never improve.
Pearl Cleage
She'd whisper to me to take my tiny piece of happiness, hold its honey in my mouth until it melts away.
Guy Vanderhaeghe
If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.
Oscar Wilde
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: … But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I'm neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.(Act I., lines 132-140)
Oscar Wilde
No matter how shitty things are, you can always get a song out of it.
Grant Morrison
But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.
Edna Ferber
Thou hast seen nothing yet.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
A monkey glances up and sees a banana, and that's as far as he looks. A visionary looks up and sees the moon.
Eoin Colfer
What day is it?"It's today," squeaked Piglet.My favorite day," said Pooh.
A.A. Milne
I am so far from being a pessimist...on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.
Eugene O'Neill
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
Oscar Wilde
You can never know enough about your characters
W Somerset Maugham
This is a bad story.”“Sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”“No, you should,” I say.“But—”“I don’t want there to be bad stories and me not know them.
Emma Donoghue
For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are the selfsame tale and contain as well all within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.
Cormac McCarthy
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.
Niall Williams
If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows.
Niall Williams
Never neglect the charms of narrative for the human heart.
Robertson Davies
Roger left the cricket stumps and they went into the drawing room. Grandpapa, at the first suggestion of reading aloud, had disappeared, taking Patch with him. Grandmama had cleared away the tea. She found her spectacles and the book. It was Black Beauty. Grandmama kept no modern children's books, and this made common ground for the three of them. She read the terrible chapter where the stable lad lets Beauty get overheated and gives him a cold drink and does not put on his blanket. The story was suited to the day. Even Roger listened entranced. And Deborah, watching her grandmother's calm face and hearing her careful voice reading the sentences, thought how strange it was that Grandmama could turn herself into Beauty with such ease. She was a horse, suffering there with pneumonia in the stable, being saved by the wise coachman.After the reading, cricket was anticlimax, but Deborah must keep her bargain. She kept thinking of Black Beauty writing the book. It showed how good the story was, Grandmama said, because no child had ever yet questioned the practical side of it, or posed the picture of a horse with a pen in its hoof."A modern horse would have a typewriter," thought Deborah, and she began to bowl to Roger, smiling to herself as she did so because of the twentieth-century Beauty clacking with both hoofs at a machine. ("The Pool")
Daphne du Maurier
There's my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don't say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.
Samuel Beckett
Everyone's got a different story.
Emma Donoghue
We can only be said to be alive in those moments, where our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Thorton Wilder
They have no imagination. A tail is just a tail to them, just a little something extra in the back.
A.A. Milne
Steam seems to have killed all gratitude in the hearts of sailors.
Jules Verne
The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
Thornton Wilder
That room was Rolandsen’s world. Rolandsen was not just irresponsibility and inebriation, he was also great thinker and inventor. There was a smell of acids that permeated the corridor and came to the notice of every visitor. Rolandsen made no secret of the fact that he had all these medicaments there solely to disguise the aroma of all the brandy he consumed. But this was part of an act designed purely to give himself an air of inscrutability.
Knut Hamsun
They walked away from the sea, Rolandsen in the lead. He kept to the edge of the road, in the snow, to leave room for the others. He was wearing light, fashionable shoes, but seemed unperturbed; he even had his coat unbuttoned in the chilly May wind. ’So that’s the church!’ said the curate. ’It looks old. I don’t suppose there’s a stove in it?’ asked his wife. ’I couldn’t say,’ Rolandsen replied, ’but I don’t think so.
Knut Hamsun
Cease endlessly striving for what you would like to do and learn to love what must be done.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
She says she glories in being abandoned
J.M. Barrie
What makes your life rainy or sunny is your attitude towards life, not the attitude of life towards you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
All things are ready, if our mind be so.
William Shakespeare
Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and -- if at all possible -- speak a few sensible words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard
By and large, the mission of any ghost is to offer humility. They point out what's important by mocking what is not.(Joshua Malina, Sports Night)
Aaron Sorkin
If we can't accept what we don't know, there really is no hope.
Rachel Joyce
The man who does good in doubt must have so much more merit than one who does it in the bright certainty of belief. "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold..." A warning against the smugness of inherited faith.
Morris West
Other priests, he knew, found an intense pleasure in the raw, salty dialect of peasant conversation. They picked up pearls of wisdom and experience over a farmhouse table or a cup of wine in a workingman's kitchen. They talked with equal familiarity to the rough-tongued whores of Trastevere and the polished signori of Parioli. They enjoyed the ribald humor of the fish market as much as the wit of a Cardinal's dinner table. They were good priests too, and they did much good for their people, with a singular satisfaction to themselves.
Morris West
The Marquesa would even have been astonished to learn that her letters were very good, for such authors live always in the noble weather of their own minds and those productions which seem remarkable to us are little better than a day's routine to them.
Thornton Wilder
I feels sorrier for him than anybody I knows. I expect he done read more books than any white man in this town. He done read more books and he done worried about more things. He full of books and worrying. He done lost God and turned his back on religion. His troubles come down just to that.
Carson McCullers
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.
T.S Eliot
Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was the symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.
Carson McCullers
If I turn mine eyes upon myself, I find myself a traitor with the rest;
William Shakespeare
He was top-heavy with conceit.
J.M. Barrie
CARDINAL WOLSEYSo farewell to the little good you bear me.Farewell! a long farewell, to all my greatness!This is the state of man: to-day he puts forthThe tender leaves of hopes; to-morrow blossoms,And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,And, when he thinks, good easy man, full surelyHis greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured,Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,This many summers in a sea of glory,But far beyond my depth: my high-blown prideAt length broke under me and now has left me,Weary and old with service, to the mercyOf a rude stream, that must for ever hide me.Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye:I feel my heart new open'd. O, how wretchedIs that poor man that hangs on princes' favours!There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to,That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin,More pangs and fears than wars or women have:And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,Never to hope again
William Shakespeare
dear little baby of the folks I work for, I got a present for you .. my whole damn life! I'm handin' it over to you & your ma & pa. if you got no money to pay, I wanna stay anyhow, my pleasure is to wait on you forever. to hell with my children & hooray for you!.. you stayin' up all night fixin' up Character Parts for me! givin' 'em what you call dignity! dignity! you know what your dignity is? a black straw hat with a flower stickin' up in front, hands folded cross my stomach, sayin' the same damn fool things .. only nice & easy & proper!" --trouble in mind (1955)
Alice Childress
For if any man thinks that he is alone is wise--that in speech, or in mind, he hath no peer--such a soul, when laid open, is ever found empty.
Sophocles
On his way offstage, the president shook hands with Lin and said, "I'm proud of you, man." (In a gesture of self-restraint, Lin had stuck to the performance calendar they had announced before learning that President Obama was coming, the one that said Javier Muñoz would play Hamilton that afternoon.)
Lin-Manuel Miranda
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool.
T.S Eliot
Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is asacrament that should be taken kneeling.
Oscar Wilde
Who knows himself a braggart, let him fear this, for it will come to pass that every braggart shall be found an ass.
William Shakespeare
I didn't make any mistake. I know that when he nearly asked me to marry him it was only on impulseIt is part if a follow-my-leader game of second-best we have all been playing - Rose with Simon, Simon with me, me with Stephen and Stephen, I suppose, with that detestable Leda Fox-Cotton. It isn't a very good game; the people you play it with are apt to get hurt.
Dodie Smith
As far as I can figure, the way that it works is this: everyone has something that happened to them. The thing that we each carry. And you can see it in people, if you look. See it in the way someone walks, in the way someone takes a compliment, sometimes you can just see it in someone’s eyes. In one moment of desperation, of fear, in one quick moment you can see that thing that happened. Everyone has it. The thing that keeps you up at night, or makes you not trust people, or stops love. The thing that hurts. And to stop it, to stop the hurt, you have to turn it into a story. And not just a story you play over and over for yourself, but a story that you tell. A story’s not a story unless you tell it. And once you tell it, it’s not yours anymore. You give it away. And once you give it away, it’s not something that hurts you anymore, it’s something that helps everyone who hears it. It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to explain. It’s probably best if we just show you how it works.
Daniel MacIvor
Everybody, he mused had everything worked out. Except me
Earl Lovelace