Quotes by Women Playwrights

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

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars.

There oughta be a woman can break down
Sit down, break down, sit down.

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

Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse.

Have you noticed that the astronomers and mathematicians are much the most cheerful people of the lot? I suppose that perpetually contemplating things on so vast a scale makes them feel either that it doesn't matter a hoot anyway, or that anything so large and elaborate must have some sense in it somewhere.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Order, cleanliness, seemliness make a structure that is half support, half ritual, and - if it does not create it - maintains decency.

Florida Scott-Maxwell

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

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

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

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

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

I've almost come to feel that it doesn't make much difference what you believe in — the thing that's important is a state of belief. It's much better to believe in nonsense than in nothing.

Margaret Ayer Barnes

Women age early, and their mistake is not knowing where to hide all the time that lies behind them so that no one sees it. What are they to do, devour it like the umbilical cords of their children? Hell and damnation!

Elfriede Jelinek

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.

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.

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,

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

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

Wendy Wasserstein

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

Doubt seems the only purity for those who are too fervent to deny, and too lucid to affirm.

Natalie Clifford Barney

Ask any woman in an arranged marriage. Love is the least stressful way out.

While I was happy enough to pray to any god, knowing that they were simply different faces created by men, of one indivisible truth.

Gillian Rubinstein

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

Marie Vieux Chauvet

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.