Playwright Quotes

But from the hoop's bewitching round,
Her very shoe has power to wound.

Radio listeners are voyeurs: lurking, invisible, eavesdropping.

Paul Fleischman

A quack is as fit for a pimp as a midwife for a bawd: they are still but in their way, both helpers of nature.

William Wycherley

An optimist … is a person who thinks the future is uncertain.

It is my father. He is arriving again for the night. He comes through the jungle to find me. He never tires of his journey.

Adrienne Kennedy

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.

You see I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry - angry and helpless. And I can never forget it. I knew more about - love... betrayal... and death, when I was ten years old than you will probably ever know in your life.

Art is something which lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal.

Chikamatsu Monzaemon

Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.

To say in print what she thinks is the last thing the woman novelist or journalist is so rash as to attempt…Her publishers are not women.

Elizabeth Robins

One can make one's life a complete misery, worrying about burglaries and shipwrecks, but ask anyone, anyone you know... earth-shattering disasters and fabulous inheritances all seems to take place exclusively in the newspapers.

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.

Our lives are not totally random. We make commitments, we cause things to happen.

Wendy Wasserstein

We are all of us invented. We are all of us cobbled together from cartilage and dust. Few of us know with certainty the name of our maker. But I do... Bram Stoker.

Do not despair. Remember there is no triangle, however obtuse, but the circumference of some circle passes through its wretched vertices.

The spring in Boston is like being in love: bad days slip in among the good ones, and the whole world is at a standstill, then the sun shines, the tears dry up, and we forget that yesterday was stormy.

Louise Closser Hale

She's adorned
Amply that in her husband's eye looks lovely,—
The truest mirror that an honest wife
Can see her beauty in.

Good friends in hard times and hard friends in good times.

My husband was in the war of the Crimea. It is terrible the hardships he went through‚ to be two months without going into a house‚ under the snow in trenches. And no food to get‚ maybe a biscuit in the day. And there was enough food there‚ he said‚ to feed all Ireland; but bad management‚ they could not get it.

Augusta, Lady Gregory

The duty of a scientist is not to distort the manifestations of natural phenomena in the light of some more or less popular idea. His duty is to explain facts.

Émile Cammaerts

The press and politicians. A delicate relationship. Too close, and danger ensues. Too far apart and democracy itself cannot function without the essential exchange of information. Creative leaks, a discreet lunch, interchange in the Lobby, the art of the unattributable telephone call, late at night.

Well, every one for himself, and Providence for us all—as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens.

I thought I was doing my duty for my country. I didn't know I was going to be treated like a convict. Did it make better soldiers of the callow youths we were then? I doubt it.

The ordinariness of people is what is often extraordinary.

One is reluctantly forced to admit that many nurses are not in any true sense of the word educators. This is a lamentable fact, and the responsibility for it must be put on the schools that have attempted to train them, but have failed to make them realize how numerous and diversified their opportunities are.