“Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.”

Time goes by so fast. Nothin’ can outrun it. Death commences too early–almost before you’re half-acquainted with life–you meet the other.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.

I don’t believe in “original sin.” I don’t believe in “guilt.” I don’t believe in villains or heroes – only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents.

Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.

The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.

Luck is believing you’re lucky.

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

There is only one true aristocracy . . . and that is the aristocracy of passionate souls!

Something in me will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.

I don’t believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents.

I can’t expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.

There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice.

Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.

Physical beauty is passing – a transitory possession – but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart – I have all these things – aren’t taken away but grow! Increase with the years!

Hank had left me his doomed army, and hed left marcie his inheritance. Unfair didnt begin to cover it.

My left hand is my thinking hand (image), my right hand my doing hand (sequence).

What little light was left inside me flickered out.

The light is the left hand of darkness.

… that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.

There was nothing left for me to do. Do you know how hard it is to say nothing ? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite?

Nora: what are you planning? Patch: i wouldn’t call this planning. I’d call this throwing a hail mary with seconds left on the clock.