Playwrights From The United States

"He would not yield, he thought, and walk more slowly, As if he knew for certain he walked to death: But with his usual pace,—deliberate, firm, Looking about him calmly, watching the world, Taking his ease . . ."

"Something had changed—but it was not the street— The street was just the same—it was himself."

"More towers must yet be built—more towers destroyed— Great rocks hoisted in air; And he must seek his bread in high pale sunlight With gulls about him, and clouds just over his eyes . . . And so he did not mention his dream of falling But drank his coffee in silence, and heard in his ears That horrible whistle of wind, and felt his breath Sucked out of him, and saw the tower flash by And the small tree swell beneath him . . . He patted his boy on the head, and kissed his wife, Looked quickly around the room, to remember it,— And so went out . . . For once, he forgot his pail."

"Each gleaming point of light is like a seed Dilating swiftly to coiling fires. Each cloud becomes a rapidly dimming face, Each hurrying face records its strange desires."

"We rub the darkness from our eyes, And face our thousand devious secret mornings . . . And do not see how the pale mist, slowly ascending, Shaped by the sun, shines like a white-robed dreamer Compassionate over our towers bending."

"We reach vague-gesturing hands, we lift our heads, Hear sounds far off,—and dream, with quivering breath, Our curious separate ways through life and death."

"The wind shrieks, the wind grieves; It dashes the leaves on walls, it whirls then again; And the enormous sleeper vaguely and stupidly dreams And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain."

"'I bound her to me in all soft ways, I bound her to me in a net of days, Yet now she has gone in silence and said no word. How can we face these dazzling things, I ask you? There is no use: we cry: and are not heard."

"My veins are afire with music, Her eyes have kissed me, my body is turned to light; I shall dream to her secret heart tonight..."

"Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain! I am dissolved and woven again... Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me. Thousands of voices weave in the rain."

"'I am the one you saw to-day, who fell Senseless before you, hearing a certain bell: A bell that broke great memories in my brain.' 'I am the one who passed unnoticed before you, Invisible, in a cloud of secret pain.'"

"'I am the one who stood beside you and smiled, Thinking your face so strangely young . . . ' 'I am the one who loved you but did not dare.'"

"A chorus of elfin voices blowing about me Weaves to a babel of sound. Each cries a secret. I run among them, reach out vain hands, and drown."

"Over the darkened city, the city of towers, The city of a thousand gates, Over the gleaming terraced roofs, the huddled towers, Over a somnolent whisper of loves and hates, The slow wind flows, drearily streams and falls, With a mournful sound down rain-dark walls."

"And, growing tired, we turn aside at last, Remember our secret selves, seek out our towers, Lay weary hands on the banisters, and climb; Climbing, each, to his little four-square dream Of love or lust or beauty or death or crime."

"'I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams, I will hold my light above them and seek their faces. I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins . . .' The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness, Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest, Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains."

"The wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams, The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street, And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain."

"Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!— But time goes on, and will, unheeding, Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn, And the wild days set true hearts bleeding."

"All lovely things will have an ending, All lovely things will fade and die, And youth, that's now so bravely spending, Will beg a penny by and by."

"O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh! When we are dead, my best belovèd and I, Close well above us, that we may rest forever, Sending up grass and blossoms to the sky."

"My heart is torn with the sound of raucous voices, They shout from the slums, from the streets, from the crowded places, And tunes from the hurdy-gurdy that coldly rejoices Shoot arrows into my heart."

"My heart has become as hard as a city street, The horses trample upon it, it sings like iron, All day long and all night long they beat, They ring like the hooves of time."

"Music I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread; Now that I am without you, all is desolate; All that was once so beautiful is dead."

"Separate we come and separate we go, And this, be it known, is all that we know."

"Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk, speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble of all these syllables a single word before the purpose of speech is gone."

"One of us sings in the street, and we listen to him; The words ring over us like vague bells of sorrow. He sings of a house he lived in long ago. It is strange; this house of dust was the house I lived in; The house you lived in, the house that all of us know."

"We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain, We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, But we know that we rose and walked, that after a while We shall lie down again."

"And there was one, beneath black eaves, who thought, Combing with lifted arms her golden hair, Of the lover who hurried towards her through the night; And there was one who dreamed of a sudden death As she blew out her light."

"From high black walls, gleaming vaguely with rain, Each yellow light looked down like a golden eye. They trembled from coign to coign, and tower to tower, Along high terraces quicker than dream they flew. And some of them steadily glowed, and some soon vanished, And some strange shadows threw."

"Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked. And death was observed with sudden cries, And birth with laughter and pain. And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skies And night came down again."

"There, in the high bright window he dreams, and sees What we are blind to,—we who mass and crowd From wall to wall in the darkening of a cloud."

"What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . . Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . . And after a while they will fall to dust and rain; Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands; And hew rock out of the earth, and build them again."

"Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid, We have built a tower of stone high into the sky, We have built a city of towers."

"We flow, we descend, we turn . . . and the eternal dreamer Moves among us like light, like evening air . . ."

"Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent."

"If your head tells you one thing and your heart tells you another, before you do anything, you should first decide whether you have a better head or a better heart."

"The length of your education is less important than its breadth, and the length of your life is less important than its depth."

"Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses."

"The original answer defines certain conditions, [...] Anything else is a different question."

"What is the essence of America? The essence of America is finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom "to" and freedom "from.""

"What women want is what men want. They want respect."

"A fool is someone whose pencil wears out before its eraser does."

"To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe."

"A good idea will keep you awake during the morning, but a great idea will keep you awake during the night."

"Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it."

"Always, Bill talked about being and becoming a writer, of all the stories and ideas inside him that had to come out. We knew he had been sending out stories all along and collecting rejection slips but the day in 1934 when Joe Danysh and I arrived at the front door of the gallery and found the envelope addressed to us both, we knew it had really begun. Inside were two one dollar bills, two street car transfers and a card which read "One for the, money / one for the show / one For Virginia / and one for Joe." Signed William Shakespeare."

"He was the first writer I fell in love with, boyishly in love. I was held by his unaffected voice, his sentimentality, his defiant individualism. I found myself in the stories he told... I learned from Saroyan that you do not have to live in some great city — in New York or Paris — in order to write... When I was a student at Stanford, a generation ago, the name of William Saroyan was never mentioned by any professor in the English Department. William Saroyan apparently was not considered a major American talent. Instead, we undergraduates set about the business of psychoanalyzing Hamlet and deconstructing Lolita. In my mind Saroyan belongs with John Steinbeck, a fellow small town Californian and of the same generation. He belongs with Thornton Wilder, with those writers whose aching love of America was formed by the Depression and the shadow of war. … Saroyan's prose is as plain as it is strong. He talks about the pleasure of drinking water from a hose on a summer afternoon in California's Central Valley, and he holds you with the pure line. My favorite is his novel The Human Comedy... In 1943, The Human Comedy became an MGM movie starring Mickey Rooney, but I always imagined Homer Macaulay as a darker, more soulful boy, someone who looked very much like a young William Saroyan..."

"A great man for the arts should be celebrated not because of the past, but for the future."

"I've been reading William Saroyan's short story "Cowards", a wonderful story about a man who hid under the bed during World War I. It's just the right short story to read right now in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war... [The characters] are Armenian Americans... in Fresno, California, but they are Americans, and they are all going off to fight in Europe during World War I. And now we are fighting again, all in different configurations. The story asks, "What is cowardice?" Is it a refusal to fight or is it just going in to fight? But that's just one little short story, and it didn't stop World War II, but maybe evolution is longer than that."

"One need not have been raised in Fresno to appreciate Saroyan, though I suppose it helps. Certainly he, better than anybody, captured the valley's strange texture: the mishmash landscape of farm, town and deserts; the jostling of so many different peoples, all a bit bewildered at finding themselves thrown together … Certainly Fresnans never forgave Saroyan for his harsher observations about the old hometown. The more political Armenians complained he wasted too many words on the human comedy, and not enough on the tragedy of a lost homeland. That he wrote so personally, and from the heart, gave literary critics their target: He was, they scolded, an undisciplined sentimentalist, mawkish. … For whatever reasons, Saroyan today is held under book-land quarantine. Few of his titles are in print. He's barely taught in schools. His own plans for literary legacy — a writers-in-residence program, posthumous publication of many works — have been scrapped or stalled. They did name a theater after him in Fresno, the one thing he expressly requested not be done. Those who remain under the Saroyan spell can only hope that the world will come around. His work simply seems too extraordinary, and universal, to be cleared from the shelves..."