Playwrights From England

"A ghost, that loved a lady fair, Ever in the starry air Of midnight at her pillow stood; And, with a sweetness skies above The luring words of human love, Her soul the phantom wooed. Sweet and sweet is their poisoned note, The little snakes of silver throat, In mossy skulls that nest and lie, Ever singing, “Die, oh! die.”Young soul put off your flesh, and come With me into the quiet tomb, Our bed is lovely, dark and sweet; The earth will swing us, as she goes, Beneath our coverlid of snows, And the warm leaden sheet. Dear and dear is their poisoned note, The little snakes of silver throat, In mossy skulls that nest and lie, Ever singing, “Die, oh! die.”"

"Old Adam, the carrion crow, The old crow of Cairo; He sat in the shower, and let it flow Under his tail and over his crest; And through every feather Leak’d the wet weather; And the bough swung under his nest; For his beak it was heavy with marrow. Is that the wind dying? O no; It’s only two devils, that blow Through a murderer’s bones, to and fro, In the ghosts’ moonshine.Ho! Eve, my grey carrion wife, When we have supped on kings’ marrow, Where shall we drink and make merry our life? Our nest it is queen Cleopatra’s skull, ’Tis cloven and crack’d, And batter’d and hack’d, But with tears of blue eyes it is full: Let us drink then, my raven of Cairo! Is that the wind dying? O no; It’s only two devils, that blow Through a murderer’s bones, to and fro, In the ghosts’ moonshine."

"To have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintance and actions, when the hour arrives in which time is more nimble than memory, is the reason which induces me to keep a journal: a journal in which I must confess my every thought, must open my whole heart!"

"I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility — I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling."

"Look at your [English] ladies of quality—are they not forever parting with their husbands—forfeiting their reputations—and is their life aught but dissipation? In common genteel life, indeed, you may now and then meet with very fine girls—who have politeness, sense and conversation—but these are few—and then look at your trademen's daughters—what are they?—poor creatures indeed! all pertness, imitation and folly."

"Here's the lily, here the rose Her full chalice shall disclose; Here's narcissus wet with dew, Windflower and the violet blue. Wear the garland I have made; Crowned with it, put pride away; For the wreath that blooms must fade; Thou thyself must fade some day, Rhodocleia."

"Whoever one is, and wherever one is, one is always in the wrong if one is rude."

"A good play is a play which, when acted upon the boards, makes an audience interested and pleased. A play that fails in this is a bad play."

"If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom He gives it."

"[T]here is a vast difference between games and play. Play is played for fun, but games are deadly serious, and you do not play them to enjoy yourself."

"The Englishwoman Grace Aguilar was a similar pioneer: her work includes the poems "Song of the Spanish Jews, During Their 'Golden Age'" and "A Vision of Jerusalem, While Listening to a Beautiful Organ in One of the Gentile Shrines," as well as books such as The Spirit of Judaism, The Women of Israel, and, posthumously, Sabbath Thoughts and Sacred Communings."

"In Mozart and Salieri we see the contrast between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does what it can."

"Lord Saint-Edith said he couldn't understand people thinking Bacon had written Shakespeare's plays. If they said Shakespeare had written the works of Bacon as a pastime he could understand it."

"I wish I was dead, And lay deep in the grave. I've a pain in my head, I wish I was dead. In a coffin of lead— With the Wise and the Brave— I wish I was dead, And lay deep in the grave."

"Every Hebrew should look upon his Faith as a temple extending over every land to prove the immutability of God and the unity of His purposes."

"Her former trials had been sharp agony and strong excitement. Her present had neither the one nor the other; yet it was fraught with as heavy suffering, as any that had gone before it; even though she knew not, guessed not, _all_ that depended upon her conversion. It would have been comparatively easy to have endured, for her faith's sake, harshness and contempt; in such a case, self-respect rises to sustain us, and we value our own tenets the more, from their startling contrast with those which could command the cruelty we endure; but Father Denis used harshness neither of manner nor of words."

"Firmly impressed in his own mind, that it was utterly vain for a soul to hope for salvation unless it believed in Jesus, the Virgin, the saints and holy martyrs; he brought heart and soul to his task; and the more he saw of Marie, the more painfully did he deplore her blind infatuation, and the more ardently desire, to save her from the eternal perdition which, as a Jewess, must await her."

"God save King Robert! then, say I," vociferated Alan, eagerly grasping the knight's hand. "Sit, sit, Sir Knight; and for the love of heaven, speak more of this most wondrous tale. Erewhile, we hear of this goodly Earl of Carrick at Edward's court, doing him homage, serving him as his own English knight, and now in Scotland--aye, and Scotland's king. How may we reconcile these contradictions?"

"Thank God I'm alive In the light of the Sun! It's a quarter to five; Thank God I'm alive! Now the hum of the hive Of the world has begun, Thank God I'm alive In the light of the Sun!"

"The art of prose governed by syncopated thinking; for thoughts curdle in the heart if not expressed. An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left."

"He had at last discovered that love had no pith in it, and that the projection of one own's feelings upon the images of a beloved was in the long run, an act of self-mutilation."

"In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he [Pursewarden] had always qualified it as 'an unsniggerable language'. (VIII)"

"The Copts — the only branch of the Christian Church which was thoroughly integrated into the Orient! But then your good Bishop of Salisbury openly said he considered these oriental Christians as worse than infidels, and your Crusaders massacred them joyfully."

"Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions - however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money. (X)"

"here was Kenilworth now heading the new department concerned with Personnel [-] one of those blank administrative constructs which offered no openings into the world of policy. A dead end. [-] he would soon develop the negative powers of obstruction which always derive from a sense of failure. (IV)"

"the confluent smallpox – invented perhaps as the cruellest remedy for human vanity (II)"

"His profession [ diplomacy ] — offered him something like a long Jesuitical training in self-deception which enabled him to present an ever more highly polished surface to the world without deepening his human experience [-] for he lived surrounded by his ambitious and sycophantic fellows who taught him only how to excel in forms of address, and the elaborate kindnesses which, in pleasing, pave the way to advancement. (II)"

"Then he saw that she was blind, her face slightly upcast to her companion's in the manner of those whose expressions never fully attain their target — the eyes of another. (II)"

"Music was invented to confirm human loneliness."

"A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying."

"A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants."

"No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat."

"Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie."

"Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other."

"Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold – the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential—the imagination."

"There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature."

"Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds (I)"

"The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time … love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know."

"The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes… I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child — Melissa’s child. I do not know why I use the word ‘escape’. The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well, then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way…."

"I think often, and never without a certain fear of Nessim's love for Justine. [-] It coloured his unhappiness with a kind of ecstasy [-] Yet one touch of humour would have saved him from such dreadful comprehensive suffering."

"It's unthinkable not to love — you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin."

"That house with its remoteness and the islands going down like soft gongs all the time into the amazing blue, and I shall never,never ever forget a youth spent there, discovered by accident. It was pure gold. But then of course … youth does mean happiness, it does mean love, and that's something you can't get over."

"I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know."

"Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked."

"I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together:the city which used us as its flora-precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!"

"Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land."

"Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think."

"It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness."

"His [a terrorist's] primary objective is not battle. It is to bring down upon the community in general a reprisal for his wrongs, in the hope that the fury and resentment roused by punishment meted out to the innocent will gradually swell the ranks of those from whom he will draw further recruits."

"Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist."