Theatrical Quotations from Recently Running Plays, a CurtainUp Feature

I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers,
and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own
— John Bartlett

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Quotes from Plays

And so, when I cast my mind back to that summer of 1936, different kinds of memories offer themselves to me. . .what fascinates me about that memory is that it owes nothing to fact. In that memory atmosphere is more real than incident and everything is simultaneously actual and illusory. — Michael in inDancing in Lughnas revived at the Irish Rep Theater

Good Times and bad times/ I've seen them all/But I'm Still Here --- Carlotta from the anthem song of Follies

Let's be superficial and pity the poor philosophers. Let's blow trumpets and squeakers and enjoy the party as much as we can, like very small, quite idiotic school children— Elyot blowing the trumpet for free-spirited hedonism, and his creator's belief that theater must always entertain in Private Lives

I could not have written it had not so many of us so needlessly died. Learn from it, and carry on the fight. Let them know that we are a very special people, an exceptional people. And that our day will come.—Larry Kramer at the June 12, 2011 Tony Awards ceremony where The Normal Heart won Best Play Revival award as well as Best Featured Performance awards for Ellen Barkin and John Benjamin Hickey.

It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them. — Lady Croom in the Broadway revival of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia

Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us — Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest currently at the Roundabout Theater

Telling the truth is a very expensive hobby.Silda forewarning her niece about the consequences of publishing her tell-all memoirOther Desert Cities

Some people build fences to keep people out. . .and other people build fences to keep people in. Rose wants to hold on to you all. she loves you.
—Bono about the fence that Troy and his son Cory are working on throughout the play even though neither quite understand's why Rose wants it since their modest home "ain't got nothing nobody want." Fences review

I was born on Easter Sunday. The Titanic went down the following Thursday. And why? Two Titanics can't exist in the world at one time! When one shows up, the other has to go down! — the intense, self-confident Harry Hay in The Temperamentals

Death ends a life,but it does not end a relationship.—Gene, the son in I Never Sang For My Father

There are times when you want to spread an alarm, but nothing has happened.—Alfieri, the narrator in The View From the Bridge

Democracy reads well but it doesn't act well — Lord Summerby in< Misalliance smartly revived by the Pearl Theater

What is the point of this stupid, painful life if not to be honest? If not to stand up for what one is in the core of one's being?—Oliver in The Pride

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute— Emily in Our Town

This mornng I was a peaceful country doctor filled with gentle thoughts of a medical description and I coveted nothing, not even my collections. Look at me now. . . if a patient came in with an appendix now I'd miss it so far I'd put his eye out!.— Dr. Haggetty expressing the effect of discovering that the paintings given to him by his deceased former patient and boarder were not as worthless as he had thought, The Late Christopher Bean.

There are people out there who came here. To be helped. To be helped. So someone would help them. To do something. To know something. To get, what do they say? To get on in the world. How can I do that if I don?t, if I fail? But I don?t understand. I don?t understand. I don?t understand what anything means . . .and I walk around. From morning ?til night: with this one thought in my head. I?m stupid.— Carol the failing student trying to communicate her desperation to her self-absorbed, somewhat pompous professor in Oleana

I know I fib a good deal but when things are important I tell the truth.— Blanche — in A Streetcar Named Desire

Love is too fragile a sentiment for out here— Mama Nadi in Ruined

Jewels did not make the queen— Mary after her personal belongings have been taken awayin Mary Stuart

Careless rapture at this stage would be incongruous and embarassing.— Ruth, explaining the more settled aspects of the second marriage of previously married couples like her and Charles in Blithe Spirit

Nothing to be done— Go Go in Waiting for Godot

A pill he is/ But still he is/All mine and I'll keep him until he is/Bewitched, bothered and bewildered like me!—from the signature song in Pal Joey

But why should it all be garbage?
Why? Why should nickels be bigger than dimes? That's the way it is.
— Fox explaining the realities of Hollywood to Karen, his secretary in Speed-the-PlowSpeed-the-Plow

Passion,can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
— Dysart— dysart in Equus

You've got to be taught to be afraid/Of people whose eyes are oddly made. . . .—--from "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught" — in South Pacific

I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father—Chris, who like his fallen brother Larry, thinks his father should have realized the men fighting World War II were "all his sons."— Chis Keller in All My Sons

. . .Every time you meet hatred, stand up against it and that way, it can never happen again— Irene Gut Opdyke in , a Polish Catholic woman who saved a dozen Jews during the Holocaust, urging a group of students to never again allow such horrors to happen.— in Irena's Vow

You're twenty-five. There's so many other things you could do besides this horseshit. Think about it. You make it to the White House. You do your four years, if you last that long, and then what? You get off the train every morning at Farragut North and trudge to some onsulting firm with all the other political has-beens. Next thing you know you're forty, the fifty, so many races under your belt you can't remember which you won and which you lost. .— Tom Duffy, who's managed enough campaigns for his advice to his young hotshot opposite to resonate.— in Farragut North

I do not understand why I'm having so much trouble taming the Wild. I've done this already. Haven't I already been through all of this? . . .Destroyed Education. Turned our children into criminals. Demolished Art! Invaded Sovereign Nations! What more can we possibly do?
---Hobart Struther— in Kicking A Dead Horse

Love can be had any day! Success is much harder.— Mrs St Maugham in the Donmar Warehouse revival of The Chalk Garden

You're like a pioneer woman without a frontier— Herbie when he meets the indominable Rose in Gypsy

you got somebody in you right from the start, and if you're lucky you figure out who it is and you become it. People who don't become are. . .well, look around you.— Louise Nevelson— in Occupant

My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.
---Samuel Beckett, quoted in review of Endgame at BAM

Life is essentially a very large brillo pad.— T. Ryder Smith in Dead Man's Cell Phone

Alcoholics are mostly disappointed men.—Doc Delaney in Come Back, Little Sheba

Contradictions are what people are, bundles of contradictions, fighting them and working them out. And I refuse to be dictated to by your overly simplistic logic-chopping approach to life—Tom in Grace

It's {television| gonna change everything, it's gonna end ignorance and misunderstanding, it's gonna end illiteracy. It's going to end war.— David Sarnoff,— in The Farnsworth Invention

The only difference between a Jew and a Christian is the superstitions to which they subscribe.— Spinoza. in David Ives' New Jerusalem

Why don't you kill yourself? Why don't you kill yourself? — B
I have thought of it. . . I am not unhappy enough. — A
From Rough For Theatre I— part of Beckett Shorts at NYTheatre Workshop

So imagine your body's a community, and your cells are the people who live there. The dream of every cell is to be immortal. . . to make endless copies of itself, but the community Can only use so many liver cells and no more than two eyes, so your cells need to cooperate. . . .— Dr. William Shumway in The Secret Order

It's remarkable, in fact, that the great majority of great men were also responsible for great carnage in their day. Even men who are only a little out of ordinary must be criminals by their very nature. Otherwise, they never rise above the masses, and they can't stand being part of the masses. .— Raskolnikov in a fascinating 3-actor Crime and Punishment

Dreams are life's coming attractions.— a line from a Feminine Ending, a new play by Sarah Treem

There is a group determined to continue. What's been set in motion can't be stopped. —Agamemmnon in Iphigenia 2.0

Aeschylus and his Greek contemporaries believed that the Gods begrudged human success and would send a curse of hubris on a person at the height of their powers; a loss of sanity tat would eventually bring about their downfall. Nowadways, we give the Gods less credit. We prefer to call it self-destruction— James Reston, in Frost/Nixon

Nothing is simple. 'Simple's' not even simple anymore. Terry, commenting on his kid brother's psychobabbling promise to get his act together in Neil LaBute's world premiering play In a Dark Dark Place

It's such a comfort that all the rich people about here are Conservatives. I believe the same may be noticed in other parts of the country. It almost seems like a special Providence.— Lady Faringford in Lady Faringford, the slim, chic Lady Bracknell-like character in the Mint Theater's 's New York premiere of The Return of the Prodigal

Barry Champlain is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.—Linda, the volatile talk show host's assistant on her experience as his occasional lover in the Broadway revival of Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio.

Note:Eventually these quotes will migrate into one of our three quote archives: Quotes from Plays. . . Quotes by Theatrical Notables. . . Shakespeare's Little Instruction Book