Playwrights From The United States

"Loyalty to a side, he said, had been instilled in him by his southern mother, but he now thought you had to be loyal to all sides, to the truth as you saw it, which, when you came down to it, meant being loyal to yourself."

"Furness […] patently believed in nothing, not even in himself, nothing, that is, but the amusing warp-and-woof of events and persons."

"It was Domna's frailty, as a young and egoistic person, to experience in a heightened way a common subjective illusion, which was that her own life was free, determined only by voluntary choices, while the lives of other people around her were subject to harsh necessity."

"A spasm of irritation shook him. He could not determine where their machinations ended and his own over-active intelligence began the work of conjecture — it was the old philosophical stickler: how to distinguish the mind's knowledge of its objects from its experience of its own processes? In short, can we know anything, he muttered under his breath."

"I learned long ago," she stoutly reiterated, "that one can't bargain in these affairs. If one wants to be effective, one hands in one's resignation and clears out. There's no other way for a man or an institution to learn that one is serious than to learn it too late."

"Humanly speaking, of course, she and Alma had the same right as anybody else to interfere in what was none of their business, the duty, in fact, of the bystander to interfere between father and son, employer and employee, state and subject, to protect elementary human rights and secure fair treatment for the weaker. Yet today's fashion was to disguise this moral feeling in an expedient garb, […] to 'sell' a moral argument in terms of a higher utility."

"For all his derogation, he truly believed in the modern, as subversive of established values, a mine or fuse laid under the terrain of the virtuous; the words, modern, secular, experimental, were drawled out by him in a seductive, blandishing tone, like a veiled erotic invitation."

"What disturbed the advocates of the dances most profoundly was the discovery of a fathomless paradox at the bottom of their friends' thinking: in following the crowd, against their own will and judgment, they were following themselves, i.e., nobody."

"When Henry Mulcahy, a middle-aged instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, Jocelyn, Pennsylvania, unfolded the President's letter and became aware of its contents, he gave a sudden sharp cry of impatience and irritation, as if such interruptions could positively be brooked no longer."

"Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain."

"The discovery that one cannot convince an opponent and that it is hopeless to go on trying involves a confession of subjectivity that deprives the world of meaning."

"[H]e came quickly to believe that the modern was some sort of duty laid on every man who had heard its call, a system of knowledge and perception equivalent to revealed religion — and for all those born too early to receive its message, for Raphael and Shakespeare, he felt a kind of pity like that of the pious Christian for the deprived souls of the ancients, who died too soon to get the benefits of the Redemption."

"I still know when I lie, I can recognize a frame-up when I make one. But Frederick is his own stooge, his own innocent front. He has a vested interest in himself. He is the perfect Protestant pragmatist. 'If I say this, it is true,' 'If I do this, it is justified.' There is no possibility of dispute because Frederick has grace, Frederick belongs to the Elect. It's the religion of the Pharisee, the religion of the businessman."

"If only one could … But it required strength. The romantic life had been too hard for her. In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak. The small state, racked by internal dissension, invites the foreign conqueror. Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility. The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance."

"[H]e was now confronted with what he imagined to be a general, undiscriminating hostility, a spirit of criticism embodied in the girl that was capricious, feminine, and absolutely inscrutable, so that he went about feeling continually guilty without knowing just what it was he had done. It haunted him that if he could anticipate every objection, he would be safe, but there was no telling what this strange girl might find fault with, and the very limitation of his knowledge of her made the number of possible objections limitless."

"When we pass from "I ought to do this" to "You think I ought to do this," it seems to us at first that we have weakened the imperative; actually, by externalizing it, we have made it unanswerable, for it is only ourselves that we can come to terms with."

"He had the true American taste for argument, argument as distinguished from conversation on the one hand and from oratory on the other. The long-drawn-out, meandering debate was, perhaps, the only art form he understood or relished, and this was natural since the argument is in a sense our only indigenous folk-art, and it is not the poet but the silver-tongued lawyer who is our real national bard."

"You know what my favourite quotation is? […] It’s from Chaucer […] Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese.""

"She could not bear to hurt her husband. She impressed this on the Young Man, on her confidantes, and finally on her husband himself. The thought of Telling Him actually made her heart turn over in a sudden and sickening way, she said. This was true, and yet she knew that being a potential divorcee was deeply pleasurable in somewhat the same way that being an engaged girl had been."

"To be disesteemed by people you don’t have much respect for is not the worst fate."

"Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the."

"In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons."

"I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets."

"I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake."

"Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex."

"I combine concrete cynicism with a sort of vague optimism."

"Imagination draws on memory. Memory and imagination combined can stage a Servants' Ball or even write a book, if that's what they want to do."

"(What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?) When I was in college I witnessed a tragic death, and my father sent me Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” — a book about a Franciscan friar in Peru who sees a rope bridge collapse, killing five people, and then tries to learn about their lives. Wilder was so great at making sense of life and death, and that book healed me. It’s a shame that we only tend to remember Wilder for the most sentimental parts of his most sentimental play."

"My idea of a dream man was Thornton Wilder"

"When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery … He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift…. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole."

"The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children."

"Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day."

"We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind."

"A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference and a longer view and finds them incongruous. It dampens enthusiasm; it mocks hope; it pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation."

"Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous."

"Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences."

"It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves."

"One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them."

"I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts."

"The theatre is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are." Yet most dramatists employ it to say: "This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.""

"A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it."

"Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech."

"On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity … The theater is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are.""

"Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want."

"The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape."

"I think myself as a fabulist, not a critic. I realize that every writer is necessarily a critic — that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. But, as I have just suggested, I believe that the practice of writing consists in more and more relegating all that schematic operation to the subconscious. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg — nine-tenths of him is underwater."

"The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way."

"Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion."

"The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous...and the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight."

"Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow."