Quotes by Women Playwrights

Elfriede Jelinek

Nelly Sachs

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Dorothy L. Sayers

Olympe de Gouges

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Augusta, Lady Gregory

Life is more like rain. The river and the lake lay down for you. All you got to do is learn how to swim fore you go where they are and jump in.... You don't go to the rain, the rain comes to you.

J. California Cooper

The progress of the American Revolution has been so rapid and such the alteration of manners, the blending of characters, and the new train of ideas that almost universally prevail, that the principles which animated to the noblest exertions have been nearly annihilated.

Mercy Otis Warren

I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel.

Linda Barnes (writer)

At these times, the things that troubled her seemed far away and unimportant: all that mattered was the hum of the bees and the chirp of birdsong, the way the sun gleamed on the edge of a blue wildflower, the distant bleat and clink of grazing goats.

in the middle of the night
people tell their dreams
and it is important, even
though there is never much
of an audience.

Michelene Wandor

As a writer, I have always considered it my job to describe the world as I know it; to struggle toward whatever portion of the truth is available to me,

Confidence is a static state. Determination is active. Determination allows for doubt and for humility - both of which are critical in the world today. There is so much that we don't know, and so much that we know we don't know. To be overly confident or without doubt seems silly to me. Determination, on the other hand, is a commitment to win, a commitment to fight the good fight.

Anna Deavere Smith

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

The head has its confines. The head's got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.

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

Wendy Wasserstein

The soul wanders in the dark, until it finds love. And so, wherever our love goes, there we find our soul.

If you can affect someone when they're young, you are in their heart forever,

People don't fear the wind until it fells a tree. Then, they say it's too much.

There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past.

Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness. I thought being extremely smart would take care of it. But I see I have been found out.

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

Marie Vieux Chauvet

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

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

We mothers rock into the heart of the world the melody of peace.

I have sometimes believed that I could see shadows spread under people's eyes when they were being frantically bored. I have seen faces age and sag under the onslaught of amiable extroversion.

A woman's got as much right -and more cause - to get drunk than any man

Shelagh Delaney

You must not allow yourself to be advised, cautioned, influenced, persuaded

Minnie Maddern Fiske

Change dont come by waitin
change come by movin...

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.

I have often been told, on the occasion of the publication of some important scientific work, that 'whatever there is true in it is not new, and what is new is not true.' This means in plain language: 'we understand what we know, but that which we ought to know, we do not understand.'

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach