Plays Quotes

“Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for time.”
― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

“O, thou art fairer than the evening air
     Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
     Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
     When he appear'd to hapless Semele;
     More lovely than the monarch of the sky
     In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms

Excerpt From: Christopher Marlowe. “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus”
― Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus

“She sat like patience on a monument smiling at grief.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“You have to talk to make sure you're alive.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“Hamlet' dwarfs 'Hamilton' - it dwarfs pretty much everything - but there's a revealing similarity between them. Shakespeare's longest play leaves its audience in the dark about some basic and seemingly crucial facts. It's not as if the Bard forgot, in the course of all those words, to tell us whether Hamlet was crazy or only pretending: He wanted us to wonder. He forces us to work on a puzzle that has no definite answer. And this mysteriousness is one reason why we find the play irresistible.

'Hamilton' is riddled with question marks. The first act begins with a question, and so does the second. The entire relationship between Hamilton and Burr is based on a mutual and explicit lack of comprehension: 'I will never understand you,' says Hamilton, and Burr wonders, 'What it is like in his shoes?'

Again and again, Lin distinguishes characters by what they wish they knew. 'What'd I miss?' asks Jefferson in the song that introduces him. 'Would that be enough?' asks Eliza in the song that defines her. 'Why do you write like you're running out of time?' asks everybody in a song that marvels at Hamilton's drive, and all but declares that there's no way to explain it. 'Hamilton', like 'Hamlet', gives an audience the chance to watch a bunch of conspicuously intelligent and well-spoken characters fill the stage with 'words, words, words,' only to discover, again and again, the limits to what they can comprehend.”
― Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter

“We have to just keep living. We'll keep going. Uncle Johnny? You and me will keep going - through the long procession of days and endless evenings, through how much it hurts, through the pain that we endure, and we will work everyday to make someone else rich and finally we'll collapse into old age, and, when the time comes, drop into our graves with the sad knowledge we would always end up there.”
― Robert Icke, Uncle Vanya

“Do you really think the rape of a continent dissolves in cigarette smoke?”
― Lorraine Hansberry, Les Blancs

“Don Juan: I feel like God is punishing me and I don't know what for.

Nurse 2: God's not punishing you. Life is Hell for all of us. You're not special.”
― Duncan MacMillan, Don Juan Comes Back from the War

“When I can't see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn't help much.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“I've dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“why distort a past that can no longer stand up for itself?”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“My family bought a new T.V.
the year I came.
It lasted seven years.”
― Cate Murray, Outskirts of the Woods

“What is like chemistry?"
"Well. Life."
"It's an outrageous farce, Oliver, with an incompetent producer...”
― William Golding, The Pyramid

“She is wearing her black dress. She isn’t crying, but she never did cry, anyhow. It’s a bright sunny day and she’s like a black shadow creeping down the empty street.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays

“Aristotle's account of the Katharsis of tragedy was a philosophic presentation of a truth that Homo religiosus had always understood intuitively: a symbolic, mythical or ritual presentation of events that would be unendurable in daily life can redeem and transform them into something pure and even pleasurable.”
― Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

“Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Evil plays on our fears. But when it comes to fighting evil, God never plays.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Emotions tend to entwine Earthlings together.”
― Ruchira Khanna, Voyagers into the Unknown

“It is amazing how sharing of one’s intimate details can make human beings forget the formality of a relationship and bring them closer together.”
― Ruchira Khanna, Voyagers into the Unknown

“Each person must implement their preferred problem solving method to address existential questions pertaining to life and death, living and loving, working and playing, resting and restructuring.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Watson. He is our better self.”
― Ken Ludwig, Ken Ludwig's Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery

“Hi, you don't know me, but I happen to be married to the man who continues to rudely interrupt you every two minutes.”
― Ben Ditmars, Ten Minutes in Heaven

“I really don't want to discuss the merits of cabbage with you.”
― Ben Ditmars, Ten Minutes in Heaven

“What we, the audience, bring when we come to the theater - what we might be feeling that day. What might have happened to us. That is a big part of what a play is.”
― Richard Nelson, Sweet and Sad

“I am nothing new under the sun but the moon is old to me”
― Debra Fear, Deleuzian Forms of Being: Poetry, Playlets and Prose Anthology

“Memory, come tell a fairy tale
About my girl who's lost and gone.
Tell, tell about the golden grail
And bid the swallow, bring her back to me.
Fly close to her and ask her soft and low
If she thinks of me sometimes with love,
If she is well? Ask too before you go
If I am still her dearest, precious dove.
And hurry back, don't lose your way,
So I can think of other things.
But you were too lovely, perhaps, to stay.
I loved you once. Good-bye, my love.”
― Celeste Raspanti, I Never Saw Another Butterfly: A Play

“A woman in the English Department at Fudan University walked with a cane as a result of criticism by Red Guards-she was kicked and beaten for advocating the reading of the Bourgeois feudalist William Shakespeare. But times had changed. This same woman had just been a faculty adviser on a student production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Shanghai Shakespeare Festival in the spring of 1986.”
― Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster

“الوزير: ماذا یحس مولاي، حین ینزلق هذا الرداء المهیب عن كتفیه؟
الملك: قلیل من الخفة.
الوزیر : وال شيء آخر
!
الملك : أي سؤال ! طبعا لا شيء
.
الوزیر : (وهو یخلع رداءه بدوره) أما انا فدعني أعترف حین أخلع ردائي
أشعر نوعا من الرخاوة
تدب في بدني .قد تهزأ مني، ولكن هذه هي الحقیقة .تخور ساقاي ، أو
تصبح الأرض أقل صلابة.”
― سعد الله ونوس, الملك هو الملك

“الملك: أنا الحلم ..إني الحلم نفسه .فماذا أرید!؟”
― سعد الله ونوس, الملك هو الملك

“في حداثتي يا مس ورزلي لم يكن أحد منا يقابل مطلقا في المجتمع أناسا يعملون لكسب قوتهم فلم يكن هذا عملا مناسبا”
― أوسكار وايلد