Playwright Quotes

You contemplate and you wander without any worries, between heaven and earth, in your own private world, and in this way you acquire supreme freedom.

I may boldly speak In right, though proud oppression will not hear me!

As I am never better than when I am mad; then methinks I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders: but reason abuseth me, and there's the torment, there's the hell.

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

That's the penalty we have to pay for our acts of foolishness - someone else always suffers for them.

It was the hour when gauze-winged insects are born that only live for a day.

Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany

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

The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning.

Imagine, if you can, what the rest of the evening was like. How they crouched by the fire which blazed and leaped and made much of itself in the little grate. How they removed the covers of the dishes, and found rich, hot savory soup, which was a meal in itself, and sandwiches and toast and muffins enough for both of them.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

At first it's pretty cool: the limitless fruit of knowledge hanging low in your path. Then you realize it's the only thing to eat around here.

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 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.

Wood to La. Vaine. "Tis true, Madame, Sir Positive and Poet Ninny are excellent men, and brave Bully-Rocks; but they must grant, that neither of e'm understand Mathematics but myself.

Thomas Shadwell

One has to look out for engineers – they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb.

I know that back in the twenties everyone who saw it judged John Barrymore's Hamlet to be unforgettable. Great though it was, I found his Richard III even more impressive. Barrymore's sinister, half-mad hunchback became incandescent as he gleefully anticipated his conquest of the Lady Anne. The genius of the actor contrived a slight but inspired alteration of Shakespeare's: 'Was ever woman in this humour wooed? Was ever woman in this humour won?' The change to 'Never was woman in this manner wooed; never was woman in this manner won' heightened the deviltry in Richard's gloating.

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

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

Chikamatsu Monzaemon

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

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.

Will you tell me how a man's
to live, and face his life, if he can't believe
that truth's like a fire,
and will burn through and be seen
though it takes all the years there are?

Maxwell Anderson

A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.

When I hear the word "culture"... I reach for my pistol.

You have to beat out for yourself many mornings on the windy headlands the sense of the fact that you get the same rainbow in the cloud drift over Waban and the spray of your garden hose. And not necessarily then do you live up to it.

Mary Hunter Austin

A powerful portfolio of physiological and behavioural evidence now exists to support the case that fish feel pain and that this feeling matters. In the face of such evidence, any argument to the contrary based on the claim that fish 'do not have the right sort of brain' can no longer be called scientific. It is just obstinate.

Marquis: Put a duck on a lake in the midst of some swans, and you'll see he'll miss his pond and eventually return to it.
Montrichard: Longing to be back in the mud!