Playwrights From The United States

"We are all so simple at heart that we become unfathomable to one another."

"The rhetoric of hate is often most effective when couched in the idiom of love."

"His fault was a common one. He simply did not know what he was;he saw no flaw in himself, a not unusual blindness and preferable, on the whole , to being unable to find any virtue in oneself."

"Modern Christianity is a encyclopedia of traditional superstition."

"No one can tell another man is true. Truth is all around us...Truth is where ever man has glimpsed divinity."

"Are we a dream in the mind of a deity, or is each of us a separate dreamer, evoking his own reality?"

"Despite all evidence to the contrary I do not believe humans innately cruel, but they fear change of any kind."

"...because academics everywhere are forever attacking one another, and I had long since learned that one must never believe what a teacher says of another."

"By definition a bore is predictable. if you think you know in advance what a man is apt to say or do, you are not apt to be disagreeably surprised by him."

"It is one thing to use text to illustrate a point one is making, but quite another to quote merely to demonstrate the excellence of one's memory."

"They say to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange."

"Constantinople has no past; only a noisy present and a splendid future, if the auguries are to be believed."

"Vengeance must end somewhere, and what better place to stop than at the prince?"

"Constantine was never a true Galilean; he merely used Christianity to extend his dominion over the world. He was a shrewd professional soldier, badly educated and not in the least interested in philosophy, though some perverse taste in him was hugely satisfied by doctrinal disputes; the mad haggling of bishops fascinated him."

"In a good cause hypocrisy becomes a virtue."

"The folly of the clever is always more than that of the dull."

"...for ferocity there is nothing on Earth equal a Christian bishop hunting "heresy", as they call any opinion contrary to their own."

"How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself."

"Books always cost more in those cities where they are least read!"

"One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange."

"It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, however suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true."

"There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem."

"DELTON 4: He is morally retarded and, like a child, he regards this world as his plaything.…"

"KRETON: War is your specialty. Historians love you for it. I love you for it. After all, not only is it fun, it’s creative! Your best scientific discoveries are made in wartime: the atom bomb, radar, luncheon meat. And think of all that travel! Getting away from home, making new acquaintances, indulging in amatory dalliance with strangers. So broadening. And then: the delirium of battle, the rush of adrenaline to the head as the trumpets sound ATTACK! Conrad, war is the principle art form of your race."

"CONRAD: (Patiently) I admit sometimes we get overexcited, but nobody wants a war, because nobody wants to be killed. KRETON: Well, every game has its penalties. I must say I would never have dreamed that one day I should be trying to convince a lower primate that he should behave like a lower primate."

"POWERS: No, I’ve seen it happen before too many times. Mr. Kreton, if there is one thing that destroys an army’s morale and discipline, it is a major war. Everything goes to hell. Lose more damn sheets and pillowcases. Your laundry’s a wreck!"

"ELLEN: Conrad’s a pacifist and willing to fight for it."

"KRETON: My dear, you must marry him too. I’m sure the three of you would make a lovely couple."

"KRETON: But I love having you bore me. You do it so beautifully."

"POWERS: Well, good morning Mr. Kreton, and how are we today? KRETON: Absolutely wallowing in the twentieth century."

"ELLEN: Of course I know you’re from another planet and all and I guess we do think an awful lot about sex, but we’re not supposed to talk about it and we only do it when nobody’s looking. KRETON: How ravishing! These primitive taboos. You revel in public slaughter: you pay to watch two men hit one another repeatedly, yet you make love secretly, guiltily and with remorse…too delicious!"

"KRETON: Well, you know how one feels about history, the glamour of the past; I expected to hear everybody talking about great events—battles, poets, that kind of thing—but of course you don’t. You just squabble among yourselves."

"I too feel hurt at the sort of reputation which hovers about my part of this venture. I cannot honestly make much of a case for myself. I played the game stolidly according to rules I abhor. But in extenuation I should like to say what many others have said before me: the theater and its writers are seriously, perhaps fatally, hampered by economic pressure. Because it costs too much to put on a play, one works in a state of hysteria. Everything is geared to success. Yet art is mostly failure. And it is only from a succession of daring, flawed works that the occasional masterwork comes. But in our theater to fail is death and the author of a play which fails is regarded with much the same sympathy as the murderer of a child."

"After the script was ready there were the usual trials, delays, problems of temperament: each participant confident the others had gone into secret league to contrive his professional ruin (and on occasion cabals did flourish…the theater is a child’s world)."

"The size of the population of course has much to do with this collective ignorance. When Aristophanes made a satiric point, he could be confident that his audience would appreciate his slyest nuance because in a small community each citizen was bound to share with his fellows a certain amount of general information, literary, religious, and political. National units today are too large and, in America at least, education is too bland to hope for much change."

"If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the things satirized; if they are not, the joke falls flat. Unfortunately for our native satirists, the American mass audience possess very little general information on any subject. Each individual knows his own immediate world, but as various research polls continually inform us, he holds little knowledge in common with others."

"And though I rather suspect that in a century’s time the novel will be as rare and private an art form as poetry today or that delicate and laborious process by which dedicated men fire glass with color, it will always be worth the doing."

"Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to "jump at de sun." We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground."

"Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism. This is particularly true for black women writers who have refused to be delineated by male-establishment models of femininity, and who have dealt with their sexuality as an accepted part of their identity. For instance, where are the women writers of the Harlem Renaissance being taught? Why did it take so long for Zora Neale Hurston to be reprinted?"

"When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb. Like all the other tumbling mud-balls, Janie had tried to show her shine."

"The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face. For a while she thought it was gone from her soul."

"There are years that ask questions and years that answer."

"‘So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he donʼt tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.’"

"After a while she got up from where she was and went over the little garden field entire. She was seeking confirmation of the voice and vision, and everywhere she found and acknowledged answers. A personal answer for all other creations except herself. She felt an answer seeking her, but where? When? How?"

"Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches."

"Well, Ah see Mouth-Almighty is still sittin' in de same place. And Ah reckon they got me up in they mouth now.""Yes indeed. You know if you pass some people and don't speak tuh suit 'em dey got tuh go way back in yo' life and see whut you ever done. They know mo' 'bout yuh than you do yo' self. They done 'heard' 'bout you just what they hope done happened.""If God don't think no mo' 'bout 'em than Ah do, they's a lost ball in de high grass."

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board."

"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It is beyond me. But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held — so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place — who knows?"

"I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."

"I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief."