|
The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.
EUGENE O'NEILL, Long Day's Journey Into Night
Happiness hates the timid! So does science!
EUGENE O'NEILL, Strange Interlude
It is Mystery -- the mystery any one man or woman can feel but not understand as the meaning of any event -- or accident -- in any life on earth ... [that] I want to realize in the theatre. The solution, if there ever be any, will probably have to be produced in a test tube and turn out to be discouragingly undramatic.
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
EUGENE O'NEILL, Lazarus Laughed
To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.
EUGENE O'NEILL, The Iceman Cometh
When men make gods, there is no God!
EUGENE O'NEILL, Lazarus Laughed
A man's work is in danger of deteriorating when he thinks he has found the one best formula for doing it. If he thinks that, he is likely to feel that all he needs is merely to go on repeating himself . . . so long as a person is searching for better ways of doing his work, he is fairly safe.
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
EUGENE O'NEILL, A Moon for the Misbegotten
I hold more and more surely to the conviction that the use of masks will be discovered eventually to be the freest solution of the modern dramatist's problem as to how -- with the greatest possible dramatic clarity and economy of means -- he can express those profound hidden conflicts of the mind which the probings of psychology continue to disclose to us.
EUGENE O'NEILL, "Memoranda on Masks"
You seem to be going in for sincerity today. It isn't becoming to you, really -- except as an obvious pose. Be as artificial as you are, I advise. There's a sort of sincerity in that, you know. And, after all, you must confess you like that better.
EUGENE O'NEILL, The Hairy Ape
For de small stealing dey puts you in jail, soon or late. But for de big stealing dey puts yo' picture in de paper and yo' statue in de Hall of Fame when you croaks! If dey's one thing I learned in ten years, listenin' to de white quality on de Pullman cars, it's dat same fact. And when I gets a chance to use it -- from stowaway to Emperor in two years. Dat's goin' some!
EUGENE O'NEILL, Four Plays
But land is land, and it's safer than the stocks and bonds of Wall Street swindlers.
EUGENE O'NEILL, Long Day's Journey Into Night
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
EUGENE O'NEILL, The Great God Brown
|
