Christopher Fry

"Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time."

"I hope I've done nothing so monosyllabic as to cheat, A spade is never so merely a spade as the word Spade would imply."

"I tell you, Miss, I knows an undesirable character When I see one; I've been one myself for years."

"The difference between tragedy and comedy is the difference between experience and intuition. In the experience we strive against every condition of our animal life: against death, against the frustration of ambition, against the instability of human love. In the intuition we trust the arduous eccentricities we're born to, and see the oddness of a creature who has never got acclimatized to being created."

"Try thinking of love, or something. Amor vincit insomnia."

"Coffee in England is just toasted milk."

"I travel light; as light, That is, as a man can travel who will Still carry his body around because Of its sentimental value."

"What after all Is a halo? It's only one more thing to keep clean."

"What is official Is incontestable. It undercuts The problematical world and sells us life At a discount."

"Where in this small-talking world can I find A longitude with no platitude?"

"The moon is nothing But a circumambulating aphrodisiac Divinely subsidized to provoke the world Into a rising birth-rate."

"I hear A gay modulating anguish, rather like music."

"The Great Bear is looking so geometrical One would think that something or other could be proved."

"The best Thing we can do is to make wherever we're lost in Look as much like home as we can."