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Quotes by Playwright
"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it."
20
"Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times."
20
"As long as one suffers one lives."
20
"I respect him. He has brains and character; and that, I may tell you, is a very unusual combination."
20
"For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you " with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell " can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it's not so difficult to be a saint. It's something He can demand of any of us, leap."
20
"And the poor lady, so small in her black satin, shrivelled up and sallow, with her funny corkscrew curls, took the little boy on her lap and put her arms around him and wept as though her heart would break. But her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer."
20
"Man's desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy (conscience) within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd."
20
"She wasn't religious. She didn't believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers."
19
"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity."
19
"One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second."
19
"To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults."
19
"If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers."
19
"The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh."
19
"Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around."
19
"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."
19
"Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other."
19
"So much of a novelist's writing, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them."
19
"The writer is more concerned to know than to judge."
19
"Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous."
19
"Don't wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto."
19
"No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness."
19
"The path to Salvation is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor's edge."
19
"You cannot write unless you write much."
19
"I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool."
19
"I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation."
19
"When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right."
19
"Whew,' he said, 'I'm glad that's over, Thomas. I've been feeling awfully bad about it.' It was only too evident that he no longer did."
19
"Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if they talked more and did less."
19
"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?"
19
"It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover."
19
"The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind."
19
"She's wonderful. Tell her I've never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you.Waddington, smiling, translated the question."She says I'm good."As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue, Kitty mocked."
19
"You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance."
19
"Say, the next time I see you, remind me not to talk to you, will you?"
19
"Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom; and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too."
18
"Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility."
18
"I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all."
18
"You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth--that God knows nothing."
18
"But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head."
18
"It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable."
18
"Monsieur Foinet got up and made as if to go, but he changed his mind, and, stopping, put his hand on Philip's shoulder."But if you were going to ask me my advice, I should say: take your courage in both hands and try your luck at something else. It sounds very hard, but let me tell you this: I would give all I have in the world if someone had given me that advice when I was your age and I had taken it."Philip looked up at him with surprise. The master forced his lips into a smile, but his eyes remained grave and sad."It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it's too late. It does not improve the temper."He gave a little laugh as he said the last words and quickly walked out of the room."
18
"I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?"
18
"Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They've given up all for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes."Waddington reflected for a little while. "I wonder if it matters what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books the write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art."
18
"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."
18
"He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied."
18
"Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer. They control the most simple Proustian episode, and an understanding of their mechanism must precede any particular analysis of their application."
18
"But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . ."
18
"A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience."
18
"It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution."
18
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