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Quotes by Playwright
"Don't wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto."
2
"I could have forgiven it if he'd fallen desperately in love with someone and gone off with her. I should have thought that natural. I shouldn't really have blamed him. I should have thought he was led away. Men are so weak, and women are so unscrupulous."
2
"Hatred seems to operate on the same glands as love it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?"
2
"They will notdisappoint you, and you will look upon them morecharitably. Men seek but one thing in life-their pleasure."
2
"Can the law get blood out of a stone? I haven't any money."
2
"It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows."
2
"You are on your back at the foot of an aspen. In its trembling shade. She at right angles propped on her elbows head between her hands. Your eyes opened and closed have looked in hers looking in yours. In your dark you look in them again. Still. You feel on your face the fringe of her long black hair stirring in the still air. Within the tent of hair your faces are hidden from view. She murmurs, Listen to the leaves. Eyes in each other's eyes you listen to the leaves. In their trembling shade."
2
"In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles."
2
"He was terribly conscious that he only had one life and it seemed to sad to think that he had wasted it. He could never surmount his immeasurable regret. And that's why I tell you that Byring is right. Even though it only lasts five years, even though he ruins his career, even though this marriage ends in disaster, it will have been worth while. He will have been satisfied. He will have fulfilled himself."
2
"She couldn't avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it."
2
"But there are not two laws, that was the next thing I thought I understood, not two laws, one for the healthy, another for the sick, but one only to which all must bow, rich and poor, young and old, happy and sad. He was eloquent. I pointed out that I was not sad. That was a mistake. Your papers, he said, I knew it a moment later. Not at all, I said, not at all. Your papers! he cried. Ah my papers."
2
"In order to be company he must display a certain mental activity. But it need not be of a high order. Indeed it might be argued the lower the better. Up to a point. The lower the order of mental activity the better the company. Up to a point."
2
"A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life."
2
"Larry has been absorbed, as he wished, into that tumultuous conglomeration of humanity, distracted by so many conflicting interests, so lost in the world's confusion, so wistful of good, so cocksure on the outside, so diffident within, so kind, so hard, so trustful and so cagey, so mean and so generous, which is the people of the United States."
2
"The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger."
2
"A mug's game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so."
2
"So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth even starting a train of thought."
2
"You cannot write unless you write much."
2
"She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?"
2
"It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die."
2
"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."
2
"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."
2
"I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation."
2
"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."
2
"Benevolence is often very peremptory."
2
"Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?"
2
"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."
2
"He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form."
2
"Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered."
2
"When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right."
2
"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."
2
"Estragon: They're too bigVladimir: Perhaps you'll have socks some day."
2
"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?"
2
"We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to."
2
"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."
2
"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."
2
"But even them, my pains, I understand ill. That must come from my not being all pain and nothing else. There's the rub. Then they recede, or I, till they fill me with amaze and wonder, seen from a better planet. Not often, but I ask no more. Catch-cony life! To be nothing but pain, how that would simplify matters! Omnidolent! Impious dream."
2
"Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something."
2
"The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you."
2
"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."
2
"Schools are made for the average. The holes are all round, and whatever shape the pegs are they must wedge in somehow. One hasn't time to bother about anything but the average."
2
"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."
2
"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."
2
"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."
2
"Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved."
2
"There is only one thing about which I am certain and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain."
2
"Estragon: And if he doesn't come?Vladimir: (after a moment of bewilderment) We'll see when the time comes."
2
"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."
2
"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."
2
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