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Quotes by Playwright
"If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write."
4
"Incontinent the void. The zenith. Evening again. When not night it will be evening. Death again of deathless day. On one hand embers. On the other ashes. Day without end won and lost. Unseen."
4
"I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool."
4
"I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?"
4
"I happened to look up and there it was. All over and done with, at last. I sat on for a few moments with the ball in my hand and the dog yelping and pawing at me. (Pause.) Moments. Her moments, my moments (Pause.) The dog's moments."
4
"Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour."
4
"POZZO:I am blind.(Silence.)ESTRAGON:Perhaps he can see into the future."
4
"You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced."
4
"The only sin is the sin of being born."
4
"It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself."
Life,
4
"Name, no, nothing is namable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don't know, I shouldn't have begun."
4
"When I penetrate into that house, if I ever do, it will be to go on turning, faster and faster, more and more convulsive, like a constipated dog, or one suffering from worms, overturning furniture, in the midst of my family all trying to embrace me at once, until by virtue of a supreme spasm I am catapulted in the opposite direction and gradually leave backwards, without having said good evening."
4
"Have you shat, my child, I said gently."
4
"Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all."
4
"He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance."
4
"For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of a man, even our anthropologists have realised that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite."
4
"...some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not."
4
"A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit."
4
"Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind."
4
"Was it necessary to tell me that you wanted nothing in the world but me?'The corners of his mouth drooped peevishly.Oh, my dear, it's rather hard to take quite literally the things a man says when he's in love with you.'Didn't you mean them?'At the moment."
4
"My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror."
4
"I do not believe that I am a vindictive man, but when the immortal gods take a hand in the matter it is pardonable to observe the results with complacency."
4
"When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me."
4
"The bedfellows politics made are never strange. It only seems that way to those who have not watched the courtship."
4
"In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time."
4
"Estragon: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy."
4
"When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line."
3
"One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second."
3
"Patsy had asked him if he had had adventures in Paris and he had truthfully answered no. It was a fact that he had done nothing; his father thought he had had a devil of a time and was afraid he had contracted a venereal disease, and he hadn't even had a woman; only one thing had happened to him, it was rather curious when you came to think of it, and he didn't just then quite know what to do about it: the bottom had fallen out of his world."
3
"You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth--that God knows nothing."
3
"The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day."
3
"On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it, so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment."
3
"His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless ..."
3
"The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness."
3
"Death was far more certain than God."
3
"It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self- pity why it was that the pulse of his brother's fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more--darkness."
3
"But it is only since I have ceased to live that I think of these things and the other things. It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life, and that I judge it, as it is said that God will judge me, and with no less impertinence. To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don't torment me, but one sometimes forgets."
3
"Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look at the little I will be leaving."
3
"Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers."
3
"The loss of reason in war seems to me honorable, like the death of a sentry at his post."
3
"Nor did he think of Celia any more, though he could sometimes remember having dreamt of her. If only he had been able to think of her, he would not have needed to dream of her."
3
"The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself."
3
"I have great affection for you, Roy" I answered, "but I don't think you are the sort of person I'd care to have breakfast with."
3
"He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied."
3
"Men of vision. Oh, I love the fine names men give each other to hide their greed and lust for adventure."
3
"In reality I said nothing at all, but I heard a murmur, something gone wrong with the silence, and I pricked up my ears, like an animal I imagine, which gives a start and pretends to be dead."
3
"And I seemed to see myself ageing as swiftly as a day-fly. But the idea of ageing was not exactly the one which offered itself to me. And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always condemned to be."
3
"Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad."
3
"People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise."
3
"Only a mediocre person is always at his best."
3
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