George Eliot, Middlemarch

Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.

Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize Lecture 2005

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

Henry David Thoreau

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Mike S. Goldbach

Comedy is tragedy plus time.
Tragedy is comedy minus timing.

Dorothy Parker

I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do any thing. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.

Dorothy Parker

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people He gave it to.

Woody Allen

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

Anonymous conversation at Sushi Seki

Girl: What is that?
Guy #1: Tuna.
Girl: Tuna with what?
Guy #2: Tuna with delicious.

--Sushi Seki, 1st Avenue

Overheard by: KMR

Woody Allen

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work ... I want to achieve it through not dying.

Lech Walesa

I'm lazy. But it's the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn't like walking or carrying things.

Walter Cronkite, on television news, 1997

With almost total unanimity, our big, corporate owners, infected with the greed that marks the end of the 20th Century, stretch constantly for ever-increasing profit, condemning quality to take the hindmost. If there is any solution to this problem it might be found in educating the share-holding public to their responsibility in owning this business which is fundamental to the preservation of our democracy.

If they understood the nature of this public service and treated their investment in it accordingly, we would be saved from compromising journalistic integrity in the mad scramble for ratings and circulation. In other words, if they did not expect the constantly increasing, unconscionable profits now expected from most investments but accepted a rational and steady return on their investment in this essential public service of newspapers and broadcast news.

Christiane Amanpour, keynote address, 2000

Yes I have often wondered why I …why we … do it? After a few seconds the answer used to come easily: because it matters, because the world will care once they see our stories … because if we the storytellers don't do this, then the bad guys will win. We do it because we are committed, because we are believers. One thing I knew for certain … I never could have sustained a relationship while I worked that hard, or was that driven by the story …

Indeed in the full flush of journalistic conviction I once told an interviewer that of course I would never get married. And I definitely would never have children. If you have a child, I said, you have a responsibility to at least stay alive.

That was seven years ago. I have been married two years and I have a five-month-old son.

[ellipses in the original]

Edward R. Murrow, keynote address 1958

We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, Oct. 31, 2005

If only lies left semen stains.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this.

Agatha Christie

Companionship is not a thing one needs every day--it is a thing that grows upon one, and sometimes as destroying as ivy growing round you.

Agatha Christie on writing

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness--to save oneself trouble.

There's no agony like [getting started]. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off.

The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.

T. E. Lawrence

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Everybody has his own hole to climb out of.

Mahatma Gandhi

Be the change you want.

Heraclitus

Under the comb, the tangle and the straight path are the same.

Said Shirazi, "Who Owns the World?"

The short answer to my question is that the rich own the world, by definition. The rich have more of everything; that’s what it means to be rich.

The long answer is that God is dead and numbers rule. The answer to every question is not a satisfying name but some mystifying numbers, not yes or no but x billion and y percent. The richest 5% of Americans now own almost 60% of the country’s wealth, while the lower three quintiles comprising 60% of the population have 4%, .3%, and at the bottom nothing or only debt. In the shrinking middle are people who need this score and that amount of tuition to get into this school so they can make that income and live in that high-scoring zip code. Once you believe this, you’re lost like me.

Said Shirazi, "Two Ideas of Freedom"

There is a long liberal tradition of changing terms rather than changing policies. This is something like changing your diaper rather than learning to stop soiling yourself. Liberal rhetoric is partly a way of avoiding reality and partly of offering empty phrases as a substitute for change. In its more academic form it also serves the purpose of excluding ordinary people from the discussion, paralyzing them with confusion or intimidating them into silence.

R. M. Rilke, The Duino Elegies

Isn't it time that we lovingly free ourselves
From the beloved, and stand it, though we tremble,
As the arrow stands the bowstring, tense to be more than itself?
For abiding is nowhere.

J. Prévert, "Déjuner du Matin"

Il a mis le café
Dans la tasse
Il a mis le lait
Dans la tasse de café
Avec le petite cuiller
Il a tourné
Il a bu le café au lait
Et il a reposé la tasse
Sans me parler.
Il a allumé
Une cigarette
Il a fair des ronds
Avec la fumée
Il a mis les cendres
Dans le cendrier
Sans me parler
Sans me regarder
Il s'est levé
Il a mis
Son chapeau sur sa tête
Il a mis
Son manteau de pluie
Parce qu'il pleuvait
Et il est parti
Sans une parole
Sans me regarder.

Et moi j'ai pris
Ma tête dans ma main
Et j'ai pleuré.

Homer, The Odyssey

My home and friends lie far. My life is pain.

Alan Paton

Nothing is ever quite, except for fools.

D. H. Lawrence

To be content in bliss, without desire or insistence anywhere, this was heaven: to be together in happy stillness.

Euripedes

Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other.

Dorothy Parker

Once, when I was young and true,
Someone left me sad --
Broke my brittle heart in two;
And that is very bad.

Love is for unlucky folk,
Love is but a curse.
Once there was a heart I broke;
And that, I think, is worse.

Hal Hartley, in Amateur

In even the smallest things she saw the pointlessness of hope.

Graffito seen in College Street bathroom

This is a trick mirror. You are beautiful.

Tony Kushner on screenwriting (from a commencement address)

And as long as I have slipped and am offering advice, here's some more: Don't smoke, are you crazy? Don't take drugs, aren'’t there enough chemicals in your shampoo and your apples and your air and your antihistimene, don'’t drink it makes you sloppy, don'’t drive an SUV are you crazy, don'’t make deals with the devil don'’t even do lunch with the devil donÂ't even take his phone calls; he wants you to write a screenplay for him and he wants to give you NOTES.

Kierkegaard, in Either/Or

Most people complain that the world is so prosaic, that life is not like romance, where opportunities are always so favorable. I complain that life is not like romance, where one has hard-hearted parents and nixies and trolls to fight, and enchanted princesses to free. What are all such enemies taken together, compared with the pale, bloodless, tenacious, nocturnal shapes with which I fight, and to whom I give life and substance?

Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex

Seated at her desk, turning over vague stories in her mind, woman enjoys the easy pretense that she is a writer; but she must come to the actual putting of black marks on white paper, she must give them meaning in the eyes of others. Then the cheating is exposed.

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower …

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable or either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us.

Various

Pain is weakness leaving the body.
U.S. Marines

Better is the enemy of good.
Clark Henderson, Miramax

Saul Bellow, Herzog

Herzog wrote, Will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.

A Chinese proverb

You can't prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from nesting in your hair.

Philip Roth, in Zuckerman Bound

Pain is in addition to everything else. There are hysterics, of course, who can mime any disease, but they constitute a far more exotic species of chameleon than the psychosomologists lead all you gullible sufferers to believe. You are no such reptile. Case dismissed.

Gary Ross on screenwriters

People put an expectation on themselves at the start of the outlining process that the story should be fully formed the minute they think of the premise. But you wouldn'’t get mad at yourself for being on page 10 when you begin writing the screenplay instead of page a hundred. That'’s because the progress at ththe screenwritingng stage is linear. But because the progress in an outline is nonlinear, people get frustrated with themselves for not being done when they'vve only just started. Then they utter the most dangerous line in all filmmakinging: I'll figure it out when I write."

Andre Malraux

What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

Robert Frost, "The Pauper Witch of Grafton"

Up where the trees grow short, the mosses tall,
I made him gather me wet snow berries
On slippery rocks beside a waterfall.
I made him do it for me in the dark.
And he liked everything I made him do.
I hope if he is where he sees me now
He's so far off he can't see what I've come to.
You can come down from everything to nothing.
All is, if I'd a-known when I was young
And full of it, that this would be the end,
It doesn't seem as if I'd had the courage
To make so free and kick up in folks' faces.
I might have, but it doesn't seem as if.

Goethe, Elective Affinities

And so they all, each in his own way, reflectingly or unreflectingly, go on with their daily lives; everything seems to take its accustomed course, for indeed, even in desperate situations where everything hangs in the balance, one goes on living as though nothing were wrong.

Alice Munro, "The Spanish Lady"

Why is it a surprise that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

William Blake

Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathesome.

Paul Desmond

Of fashion models, he said, "Sometimes they go around with guys who are scuffling -- for a while. But usually they end up marrying some cat with a factory. This is the way the world ends, not with a whim but a banker."

W. H. Auden, "Time Will Say Nothing But I Told You"

Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away?
Will time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

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