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Quotes by Playwright
"Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something."
17
"The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn."
17
"Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered."
17
"That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."
17
"The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths."
17
"Women like silent men. They think they're listening."
17
"Estragon: And if he doesn't come?Vladimir: (after a moment of bewilderment) We'll see when the time comes."
17
"Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour."
17
"You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced."
17
"He accepted the deformity which had made life so hard for him; he knew that it had warped his character, but no he saw also that by reason of it he had acquired that power of introspection which had given him so much delight. Without it he would never have had his keen appreciation of beauty, his passion for art and literature, and his interest in the varied spectacle of life. Then he saw that normal was the rarest thing in the world. Everyone had some defect of body or of mind. The only reasonable thing was to accept the good of men and be patient with their faults."
17
"I'm one of the few persons I ever met who are able to learn from experience."
17
"I don't see why the things we believe absolutely now shouldn't be just as wrong as what they believed in the past.''Neither do I.''Then how can you believe anything at all?''I don't know."
17
"Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures."
17
"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."
17
"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."
17
"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."
16
"Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long."
16
"And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another."
16
"The greatest tragedy of life is not that men perish but that they cease to love."
16
"Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation."
16
"There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared."
16
"A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her . . . but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account."
16
"How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt."
16
"One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn't wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is he with?"
16
"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."
16
"To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever serve that they should have ben born."
16
"A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute."
16
"A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing."
16
"Irony is a gift of the gods, the most subtle of all the modes of speech. It is an armour and a weapon; it is a philosophy and a perpetual entertainment; it is food for the hungry of wit and drink to those thirsting for laughter..."
16
"Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned."
16
"Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away."
16
"Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust."
16
"Its like reproaching someone who has no ear for music because he's bored at a symphony concert. Is it fair to blame me because you ascribed to me qualities that I hadn't got? I never tried to deceive you by pretending I was anything I wasn't. I was just pretty and gay. You don't ask for a pearl necklace or a sable coat at a booth in a fair, you ask for a tin trumpet and a toy balloon."
16
"Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling."
16
"Yet magic is no more the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love, and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen."
16
"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."
16
"What d'you suppose I care if I'm a gentleman or not? If I were a gentleman I shouldn't waste my time with a vulgar slut like you."
16
"The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you."
16
"Women are strange little beasts,' he said to Dr. Coutras. 'You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.' He shrugged his shoulders. 'Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls."
16
"It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do. He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slopped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories."
16
"Ada: And why life? (Pause.) Why life, Henry? (Pause.) Is there anyone about?Henry: Not a living soul.Ada: I thought as much. (Pause.) When we longed to have it to ourselves there was always someone. Now that it does not matter the place is deserted."
16
"I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing."
16
"Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years."
16
"Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God " a being capable of understanding."
16
"But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design."
16
"He had opened the book at random several times, seeking a sortes Virgilianae, before he chose the sentences on which his code was to be based. 'You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall.' It was as if in choosing that passage, he were transmitting a signal of defiance to both the services. The last word of the message, when it was decoded by Boris or another, would read 'goodbye."
16
"He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance."
16
"Himself an ugly man, insignificantof appearance, he prized very highly comeliness in others."
16
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