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Quotes by Playwright
"The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them."
3
"One can't love humanity. One can only love people."
3
"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."
3
"Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline."
3
"What did it all mean? He thought of his own life, the high hopes with which he had entered upon it, the limitations which his body forced upon him, his friendlessness, and the lack of affection which had surrounded his youth. He did not know that he had ever done anything but what seemed best to do, and what a cropper he had come! Other men, with no more advantages than he, succeeded, and others again, with many more, failed. It seemed pure chance. The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore."
3
"Human nature is not black and white but black and grey."
3
"There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle."
3
"It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it."
3
"Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets."
3
"You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action."
3
"The career of a writer is comparable to that of a woman of easy virtue. You write first for pleasure, later for the pleasure of others and finally for money."
3
"And if ever I'm reduced to looking for a meaning to my life, you never can tell, it's in that old mess I'll stick my nose to begin with, the mess of that poor old uniparous whore and myself the last of my foul brood, neither man nor beast."
3
"What is certain is this, that I never rested in that way again, my feet obscenely resting on the earth, my arms on the handlebars and on my arms my head, rocking and abandoned. It is indeed a delporable sight, a deplorable example, for the people, who so need to be encouraged, in their bitter toil, and to have before their eyes manifestations of strength only, of courage and joy, without which they might collapse, at the end of the day, and roll on the ground."
2
"I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation."
2
"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."
2
"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."
2
"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."
2
"Everything passed, and what trace of its passage remained? It seemed to Kitty that they were all, the human race, like the drops of water in that river and they flowed on, each so close to the other and yet so far apart, a nameless flood, to the sea. When all things lasted so short a time and nothing mattered very much, it seemed pitiful that men, attaching an absurd importance to trivial objects, should make themselves and one another so unhappy."
2
"A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious."
2
"It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible."
2
"They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous term, jewelled, exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to utter wit, and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else; it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words."
2
"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."
2
"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."
2
"It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent."
2
"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."
2
"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."
2
"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."
2
"Oh, it's always the same,' she sighed, 'if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it."
2
"Her pain was so great that she could have screamed at the top of her voice. She had never known that one could suffer so much, and she asked herself desperately what she had done to deserve it."
2
"It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it."
2
"I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me."
2
"When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character."
2
"If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers."
2
"Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long."
2
"But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head."
2
"Great writers create, writers of smaller gifts copy."
2
"In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?"
2
"When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckettas told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett."
2
"The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water."
2
"Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement."
2
"It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable."
2
"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."
2
"You've been brought up like a gentleman and a Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation.'Well, I know I'm not a Christian and I'm beginning to doubt whether I'm a gentleman,' said Philip."
2
"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."
2
"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."
2
"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."
2
"The more people I meet the happier I become."
2
"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?"
2
"There's never an end for the sea."
2
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