Playwrights From The United States

"I made him with these hands, and with these hands I'll destroy him."

"The Abbey always reminds me of that old toast, 'Above lofty timbers, the walls around are bare, echoing to our laughter, as though the dead were there.'"

"Look, it's moving. It's alive, it's alive, it's alive. It's moving. It's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive!"

"They're all crazy. They're all crazy except you and me. Sometimes I have me doubts about you."

"I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even horrify you. So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now is your chance to—Well, we warned you."

"Have you never wanted to do anything that was dangerous? Where should we be if nobody tried to find out what lies beyond? You never wanted to look beyond the clouds and the stars, or to know what causes the trees to bud, and what changes a darkness into light? But if you talk like that, people call you crazy. Well, if I could discover just one of these things—what eternity is, for example—I wouldn't care if they did think I was crazy."

"You do not quite get what I mean. Herr Frankenstein was interested only in human life. First to destroy it, then recreate it. There you have his mad dream."

"I never drink...wine."

"My mind is just as open as it ever was, professor. But it's a scientific mind, and there's no place in it for superstitions."

"I am Dracula.... I bid you welcome."

"Why, even when I was innocent her hatred of me hurt a good deal. Now that I'm guilty, her belief in me would hurt even more."

"Do you believe that the dead can influence the living?... Could you conceive of a superhuman mentality influencing someone from the other side of death?... There is such a one.... Someone, something that reaches out from beyond the grave and fills me with horrible impulses."

"She was beautiful when she died—a hundred years ago."

"Possibly there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your psychiatry, Mr. Garth."

"You can't murder a man who's been dead for five centuries."

"A life on the ocean wave! A home on the rolling deep, Where the scattered waters rave, And the winds their revels keep! Like an eagle caged I pine On this dull unchanging shore: Oh give me the flashing brine, The spray and the tempest's roar!"

"The cold blast at the casement beats; The window-panes are white; The snow whirls through the empty streets; It is a dreary night!"

"When the night-wind bewaileth the fall of the year, And sweeps from the forest the leaves that are sere; I wake from my slumber and list to the roar And it saith to my spirit, "No more, never more!""

"When Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology came out in Italian, suddenly there was widespread interest in North American writing."

"Go by reverently, and read with sober care How a great people, riding with defiant shouts The centaur of Revolution, Spurred and whipped to frenzy, Shook with terror, seeing the mist of the sea Over the precipice they were nearing, And fell from his back in precipitate awe To celebrate the Feast of the Supreme Being."

"And when you are poor and have to carry The Christian creed and wife and children All on your back, it is too much! That's why I made the Elixir of Youth, Which landed me in the jail at Peoria Branded a swindler and a crook By the upright Federal Judge!"

"Blind as I was, I tried to get out As the carriage fell in the ditch, And was caught in the wheels and killed."

"You may think, passer-by, that Fate Is a pit-fall outside of yourself, Around which you may walk by the use of foresight And wisdom."

"In my Spanish cloak, And old slouch hat, And overshoes of felt, And Tyke, my faithful dog, And my knotted hickory cane, I slipped about with a bull's-eye lantern From door to door on the square"

"In time you shall see Fate approach you In the shape of your own image in the mirror; Or you shall sit alone by your own hearth, And suddenly the chair by you shall hold a guest, And you shall know that guest, And read the authentic message of his eyes."

"The earth keeps some vibration going There in your heart, and that is you. And if the people find you can fiddle, Why, fiddle you must, for all your life."

"I never started to plow in my life That some one did not stop in the road And take me away to a dance or picnic. I ended up with forty acres; I ended up with a broken fiddle — And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories, And not a single regret."

"He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come."

"The soldiers who faced one another along the Western Front were drawn from remarkably similar societies. On both sides there were industrial workers and farm labourers. On both sides there were aristocratic senior officers and middle-class junior officers. On both sides there were Catholics, Protestants and Jews. Anyone seeking fundamental differences of national character will look in vain in the records of the trenches. There could be no better illustration of this point than four of the finest novels written about the war by former soldiers - Henri Barbusse's Under Fire, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Frederic Manning's Middle Parts of Fortune and Emilio Lussu's Sardinian Brigade - which depict the experience of service in the ranks in almost interchangeable ways."

"A hospital alone shows what war is."

"I often sit over against myself, as before a stranger, and wonder how the unnameable active principle that calls itself to life has adapted itself even to this form. All other expressions live in a winter sleep, life is simply one continual watch against the menace of death;—it has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct—it has reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious thought—it has awakened in us the sense of comradeship, so that we escape the abyss of solitude—it has lent us the indifference of wild creatures, so that in spite of all, we perceive the positive in every moment, and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of nothingness."

"But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?"

"No, we are not related. No, we are not related. Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more."

"A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends."

"Tjaden reappears. He is still quite excited and again joins the conversation, wondering just how a war gets started. "Mostly by one country badly offending another," answers Albert with a slight air of superiority. Then Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. "A country? I don't follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat." "Are you really as stupid as that, or are you just pulling my leg?" growls Kropp. "I don't mean that at all. One people offends the other—" "Then I haven't any business here at all," replies Tjaden, "I don't feel myself offended." "Well, let me tell you," says Albert sourly, "it doesn't apply to tramps like you." "Then I can be going home right away," retorts Tjaden, and we all laugh."

"I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me."

"It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is often brought on by small men. They are so much more energetic and uncompromising than the big fellows."

"We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers — we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals."

"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."

"We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war."

"Aber das ist wohl so, weil ein einzelner immer der Tod ist — und zwei Millionen immer nur eine Statistik."

"It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I might have been smashed to atoms, and in the open may survive ten hours' bombardment unscathed. No soldier survives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck."

"It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her."

"Who now shall accuse and arraign us? What man shall condemn and disown? Since Christ has said only the stainless Shall cast at his fellows a stone."

"Behold this sea, that sapphire sky! Where nature does so much for man, Shall man not set his standard high, And hold some higher, holier plan? Some loftier plan than ever planned By outworn book of outworn land?Where God has done so much for man, Shall man for God do aught at all? The soul that feeds on books alone — I count that soul exceeding small That lives alone by book and creed,— A soul that has not learned to read."

"Almost his first words were, "Well, let us go and talk with the poets!" In vain I assured this untamed poet that the "Bards of San Francisco Bay," whom he had so naively saluted, had taken the vows of neither brotherhood nor sisterhood; that they feasted at no common board; flocked not; discoursed with no beaded rills; neither did their skilled hands sweep any strings whatever, and he must, therefore, listen in vain for the seraphic song."

"O, the sea of lights for streaming When the thousand flags are furled— When the gleaming bay lies dreaming As it duplicates the world!You will come my dearest, truest! Come my sovereign queen often; My blue skies will then be bluest; My white rose be whitest then:Then the song! Ah, then the sabre Flashing up the walls of night! Hate of wrong and love of neighbor Rhymes of battle for the Right!"

"We plant this stone as some small seed Is sown at springtime, warm with earth; We sow this seed as some good deed Is sown, to grow until its worth Shall grow, through rugged steeps of time, To touch the God-built stars sublime."

"Man's books are but a climbing stair, Lain step by step, like stairs of stone; The stairway here, the temple there — Man's lampad honor, and his trust, The God who called him from the dust."

"O woman, born first to believe us; Yea, also born first to forget; Born first to betray and deceive us, Yet first to repent and regret!O first then in all that is human, Lo! first where the Nazarene trod, O woman! O beautiful woman! Be then first in the kingdom of God!"