Peter Shaffer - Equus (1974)

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Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.

Peter Shaffer
All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there. I can't see it, because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle. I can't jump because the bit forbids it, and my own basic force — my horsepower, if you like — is too little.

Peter Shaffer
He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him!... My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost!

Peter Shaffer
What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?

Peter Shaffer
Tragedy obviously does not lie in a conflict of Right and Wrong, but in a collision between two different kinds of Right...

Peter Shaffer
Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.

Peter Shaffer
All my wife has ever taken from the Mediterranean—from that whole vast intuitive culture—are four bottles of Chianti to make into lamps.

Peter Shaffer
We keep saying old people are square. Then when they suddenly aren't—we don't like it!

Peter Shaffer
The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes—all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills—like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal.

Peter Shaffer
Look,... to go through life and call it yours — your life — you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!'

Peter Shaffer
Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?

Peter Shaffer
A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.

Peter Shaffer