Eugene o'neill quotes

Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself.

Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.

What's the use coming home to get the blues over what can't be helped.

Two days ago we waded through the mud out to this grave beneath the pines at the foot of the hill to place a Christmas wreath on it, hoping he would look down from the Paradise of Ten Billion Trees and Unrationable Dog Biscuits and pity us.

There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.

When men make gods, there is no God!

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.

Critics? I love every bone in their heads.

Irish as a Paddy's pig.

Our lives are merely strange dark interludes in the electric display of God the Father.

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!

Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage, light it, learn about it. When you've done that you will probably know how to write a play.

You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.

Age's terms of peace, after the long interlude of war with life, have still to be concluded-Youth must keep decently away-so many old wounds may have to be unbound, and old scars pointed to with pride, to prove to ourselves we have been brave and noble.

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.

The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty-the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.

The sea hates a coward.

Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?

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.

One last word of farewell, dear master and mistress. Whenever you visit my grave, say to yourselves with regret but also happiness in your hearts at the remembrance of my long happy life with you: "Here lies one who loves us and whom we loved." No matter how deep my sleep I shall hear you, and not all the power of death can keep my spirit from wagging a grateful tail.

When I was a kid I used to get fun out of my horrors.

Dey's some things I don't got to be told. I kin read them in folks' eyes.

We fought so long against small things that we became small ourselves.

The devil! what beastly things our memories insist on cherishing!

Happiness hates the timid. So does science.

Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.

[Her] love and tenderness ... gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play-write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.

It's a great game - the pursuit of happiness.

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.

Dogs...do not ruin their sleep worrying about how to keep the objects they have, and to obtain the objects they have not. There is nothing of value they have to bequeath except their love and their faith.

Why can’t you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. You’ll find what you’re trying to say in him- as you’ll find everything else worth saying. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep.'' - 'Fine! That’s beautiful. But I wasn’t trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let’s drink up and forget it. That’s more my idea.

The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too.

We are where centuries only count as seconds, and after a thousand lives, our eyes begin to open.

Those who succeed and do not push on to greater failure are the spiritual middle-classers.

If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself -- ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity -- before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.

Curiosity killed the cat.

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!

While you are still beautiful and life still woos, it is such a fine gesture of disdainful pride to jilt it.

Life is a long drawn out lie, with a sniffling sigh at the end of it.

A game of secret, cunning stratagems, in which only the fools who are fated to lose reveal their true aims or motives - even to themselves.

I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame; I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame; But I know that I shall find surcease, the rest my spirit craves, Where the rainbows play in the flying spray, 'Mid the keen salt kiss of the waves.

Suppose I was to tell you that it's just beauty that's calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell which lures me, the need of freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on----in quest of the secret which is hidden over there----beyond the horizon?

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity - but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

I will be an artist or nothing!

I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room - and God damn it - died in a hotel room.

The only living life is in the past and future - the present is an interlude - strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness that we are living.

I am so far from being a pessimist...on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.

We are such things as rubbish is made of, so let's drink up and forget it.

We need above all to learn again to believe in the possibility of nobility of spirit in ourselves.

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.

The old - like children - talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own!

What beastly incidents our memories insist on cherishing, the ugly, and the disgusting; the beautiful things we have to keep diaries to remember.

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The Grace of God is glue.

Dalmatians are not only superior to other dogs, they are like all dogs, infinitely less stupid than men.

The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.

We talk about the American Dream, and want to tell the world about the American Dream, but what is that Dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things? I sometimes think that the United States for this reason is the greatest failure the world has ever seen.

One may not give one's soul to a devil of hate - and remain forever scatheless.

One should be either sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.

God gave us mouths that close and ears that don't... that should tell us something.

I hate doctors! They'll do anything... to keep you coming to them. They'll sell their souls. What's worse, they'll sell yours, and you never know it till one day you find yourself in hell.

I spent a year in Professor Baker's famous class at Harvard. There, too, I learned some things that were useful to me-particularly what not to do. Not to take ten lines, for instance, to say something that can be said in one line.

We'd be making sail in the dawn, with a fair breeze, singing a chanty song wid no care to it. And astern the land would be sinking low and dying out, but we'd give it no heed but a laugh, and never look behind. For the day that was, was enough, for we was free men - and I'm thinking 'tis only slaves do be giving heed to the day that's gone or the day to come - until they're old like me.

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.

Writing is my vacation from living.

Life is perhaps best regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings.

No dog is as well bred or as well mannered or as distinguished and handsome.

How thick the fog is. I can't see the road. All the people in the world could pass by and I would never know. I wish it was always that way. It's getting dark already. It will soon be night, thank goodness.