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Quotes by Playwright
"Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away."
18
"Married people grow like each other."
18
"If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions: he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it."
18
"Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence."
18
"He was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he caused others."
18
"I do not attachany exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life isthere to be lived rather than to be written about. My aimis to search out the manifold experience that it offers,wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents.I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishmentwhich does not absorb but rather adds pleasure toexistence. And as for posterity-damn posterity."
18
"Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair."
18
"To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was."
18
"I've been quite happy. Look, here are my proofs. Remember that I am indifferent to discomforts which would harass other folk. What do the circumstances of life matter if your dreams make you lord paramount of time and space?"
18
"Estragon: You see, you feel worse when I'm with you. I feel better alone, too.Vladmir: Then why do you always come crawling back?Estragon: I don't know."
18
"Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mother."
18
"If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself."
18
"Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge."
18
"My second wife - I was still young then - she left me, and I made the mistake of winning her back. It took me years to lose her again after that. She was a good woman. It is not easy to lose a good woman. If one must marry it is better to marry a bad woman."
18
"A book takes me a year to write. It's too hard work for a revenge. If you knew how little you had to revenge."
18
"We do not write because we want to, we write because we have to."
18
"I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy."
18
"Heresy is another word for freedom of thought."
18
"...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."
18
"Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind."
18
"It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love."
18
"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."
18
"The bedfellows politics made are never strange. It only seems that way to those who have not watched the courtship."
18
"Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together."
17
"It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it."
17
"She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs."
17
"If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?"
17
"I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable."
17
"Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to throw up a career after half an hour's meditation, because you saw in another way of living a more intense significance. And it required still more character never to regret the sudden step. I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life. Is to do what you most want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual. But again I held my tongue, for who am I to argue with a knight?"
17
"Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity."
17
"What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories."
17
"Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever."
17
"I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school--a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire."
17
"I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here."
17
"The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself."
17
"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."
17
"When a woman loves you she's not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her."
17
"My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition--that's all. I was in a position to help this young man my wife loved. He soon showed his ambition then. There are different types of ambition - that is all, and my wife found she preferred mine. Because it was limitless. They do not feel the infinite is an unworthy rival, but for a man to prefer the desk of an assistant manager - that is an insult."
17
"He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death."
17
"Milk is very nice, especially with a drop of brandy in it, but the domestic cow is only too glad to be rid of it. A swollen udder is very uncomfortable."
17
"Nothing in life was as ugly as death."
17
"Ah earth you old extinguisher."
17
"The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes."
17
"I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do."
17
"Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God -- a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers."
17
"One can't reason away regret-it's a bit like falling in love, falling into regret."
17
"Benevolence is often very peremptory."
17
"He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form."
17
"She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy."
17
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