20th-century Playwright Quotes

We can only do what is possible for us to do. But still it is good to know what the impossible is.

María Irene Fornés

First rape a people
simmer for centuries
bring memories to boil
foil voice of drum
add pinch of pain
to rain of rage
stifle drum again
then mix strains of blood
over slow fire
watch fever grow

There's a strange thing goes on inside a bubble. It's hard to describe. People who are in it can't see outside of it, don't believe there is an outside.

Look baby, you just have to look at everyone like they're bugs under a microscope. Like ants. Figure out the patterns.

Lydia R. Diamond

It doesn't matter what kind of world we live in as long as we have each other.

I begin to perceive that I am a woman. What that is, heaven knows... the philosophy is yet to be written, there is a world to be explored.

You can't. Do you hear me? You think you've figured something out? You run over here so pleased with yourself because you changed your mind. Now you're certain. You're so... sloppy. You don't know anything. The book, the math, the dates, the writing, all that stuff you decided with your buddies, it's just evidence. It doesn't finish the job. It doesn't prove anything.

The soul is a millstone, an albatross, it meddles in everything. It creates ties to torture us.

Marie Vieux Chauvet

We are like icebergs in the ocean: one-eighth part consciousness and the rest submerged beneath the surface of articulate apprehension.

William Gerhardie

So many women here are ruled by their bodies. All buxom or bony and I don't want a confused woman or a careless woman or a depressed woman, Franck, I want a woman who is entirely under control. How can a woman look after my house and my children if she can't even look after her own body?

On directing:

I pride myself on being available to as many people's stories as I possibly can.

George C. Wolfe

Henry: Anytime you hear a man called "loony," just remember that's a great compliment to the man and a great disrespect to the loon. A loon doesn't wage war, his government is perfect, being nonexistent. He is the world's best fisherman and completely in control of his senses, thank you.

Robert E. Lee (playwright)

You will not fight your battles on my body anymore.

And suppose we solve all the problems it presents? What happens? We end up with more problems than we started with. Because that's the way problems propagate their species. A problem left to itself dries up or goes rotten. But fertilize a problem with a solution — you'll hatch out dozens.

Film can express things that computers never will. Film is a series of photographs separated by split seconds of darkness. Film is light and shadow.

I've been living in Portland for five months and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I probably won't really know for years because that's how it works right? You don't really develop feelings about a place till you've left it. It's like a girl or a dog.

Fear is the touch of death, death reminding us of its existence.

Your revolution will not happen between these thighs.

Sarah Jones (stage actress)

And from their trembling lips shall swell
A song of hope the world can understand.
All this to them shall be a glorious sign,
A glimmer of that resurrection morn,
When age-long Faith crowned with a grace benign
Shall rise and from their brows cast down the thorn
Of prejudice. E'en though through blood it be,
There breaks this day their dawn of Liberty.

Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr.

You gone have to pass off that baton, little man. You in a relay race, albeit the fastest runner we done ever seen't. But you 'bout to burn out, superstar. You gone need to pass off that baton.

So even the most unlikely events have to take place somewhere...

David Lindsay-Abaire

During relaxation we drop our guard. Particularly in conversation. Relaxed conversation leads to openness. And in openness we often reveal what should never be revealed.

Edward Carey (novelist)

If you take away ideology, you are left with a case by case ethics which in practice ends up as me first, me only, and in rampant greed.

Richard Nelson (playwright)

Seminar is not yet officially a transitive verb. Still, most graduate students in any large research-oriented university have at times felt themselves more the helpless objects of a seminar than its active participants. Seminared into numbness describes that feeling of oversaturation.

It seems to me if they ain't got you one way then they've got you another. So what's it all about, that's what I keep asking myself, what's it all about?