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Quotes by Playwright
"Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it's a mistake to make a habit out of it."
2
"A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life."
2
"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."
2
"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."
2
"He knew that she had been dreaming that night and he knew what her dreams were about. She had forgotten them. He forebode to look at her. It gave him a grim, horrible, and rather uncanny sensation to think that a vivid, lacerating life could go on when one sunk in unconsciousness, a life so real that it could cause tears to stream down the face and twist the mouth in woe, and yet when the sleeper woke left no recollection behind."
2
"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."
2
"Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist."
2
"An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones."
2
"It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it."
2
"I'm one of the few persons I ever met who are able to learn from experience."
2
"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."
2
"As long as one suffers one lives."
2
"Heresy is another word for freedom of thought."
2
"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."
2
"When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination."
2
"Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five."
2
"I respect him. He has brains and character; and that, I may tell you, is a very unusual combination."
2
"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."
2
"We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person."
2
"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."
2
"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."
2
"There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks."
2
"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."
2
"Himself an ugly man, insignificantof appearance, he prized very highly comeliness in others."
2
"Then this must be my answer: We know that the attributes of God are infinite and it has always seemed strange to me that men have never given Him credit for common sense. It is hard to believe that He would have created so beautiful a world if He had not decided men to enjoy it. Would He have given the stars their glory, the birds their sweet song, and the flowers, their fragrance if He had not wished us to delight in them? I shave sinned before men and men have condemned me. God made me a man with passions of a man, and did He give them to me only that I should suppress them? He gave me my adventurous spirit and my love of life. I have a humble hope that when I am face to face with my Maker He will condone my imperfections and I shall find mercy in His sight."
2
"It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up."
2
"I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell... their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ."
2
"Act so that every action of yours should be capable of becoming an universal rule of action for all men."
2
"She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her."
2
"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."
2
"The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties."
2
"A veritable incubator of short cuts, schemes and devices to overcome the truth."
2
"It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive."
1
"If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It's not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don't know how. But I need it, how I need it."
1
"We always find something, eh Didi, to let us think we exist?"
1
"Seen no matter how and said as seen. Dread of black. Of white. Of void. Let her vanish. And the rest. For good."
1
"My mother. I don't think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers."
1
"When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?"
1
"It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes."
1
"What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?"
1
"The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching."
1
"Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned."
1
"The passing moment is all we can be sure of it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it."
1
"Nothing in life was as ugly as death."
1
"What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature."
1
"Ah earth you old extinguisher."
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