Quotes by Women Playwrights

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

Florida Scott-Maxwell

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

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

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

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

A guardian angel comes when you are very young, and gives you special dispensation. From what? From the world. Yours might be luck. Mine is money.

Every one-night-stand or man in a one-night-stand is like every other one-night-stand or man in a one-night-stand because the sex in a one-night-stand is without time and only time allows value.

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

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

Shelagh Delaney

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

There's a word in Japanese for being sad in the springtime - a whole word for just being sad - about how pretty the flowers are and how soon they're going to die.

Hanging head downwards between cliffs of bone, was the baby, its arms all but clasped about its neck, its face aslant upon its arms, hair painted upon its skull, closed, secret eyes, a diver poised in albumen, ancient and epic, shot with delicate spasms, as old as a Pharaoh in its tomb.

The love of those among whom one has been reared is usually not love at all. One can die inwardly without any of them being aware of it.

Evelyn Scott (writer)

I feel like I'm eighty years old. I'm tired of life and my mind wants to die.

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.

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.

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)

When I was four I thought everything in TV was just TV, then I was five and Ma unlied about lots of it being pictures of real and Outside being totally real. Now I'm in Outside but it turns out lots of it isn't real at all.

It has been explained to me that toys are packaged in shards, to be assembled by the middle-aged and butter-fingered, because this makes it easier for the shippers.... If they had to spend hours and hours putting handlebars onto bicycles... they would repent their ways and deliver something that looked like a rocking horse and not like the result of a small street accident.

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

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

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

Natalie Clifford Barney