Top 100 Curtain Quotes
#1. Every book should begin with attractive endpapers. Preferably in a dark colour: dark red or dark blue, depending on the binding. When you open the book it's like going to the theatre. First you see the curtain. Then it's pulled aside and the show begins.
Cornelia Funke
#2. It was the Victorians who covered the piano legs and drew a heavy curtain over what a lady got up to in her boudoir.
Laurie Graham
#3. Grief is a little like being in a fresh snowfall. A light, cold curtain falls between you and the rest of the world.
Elise Forier Edie
#4. I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.
David Knopfler
#5. For true growth and multiplication there must be a curtain time span.
Sunday Adelaja
#6. So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting.
Richard Wright
#7. You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it, you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths.
John Wesley Powell
#8. The theatre is not the place for the musician. When the curtain is up the music interrupts the actor, and when it is down the music interrupts the audience.
Sir Arthur Sullivan
#9. I write to raise the curtain on life's endless possibilities. Because you asked, Pourquoi?
Peggy Kopman-Owens
#10. Remember to tuck the shower curtain inside the bathtub.
Conrad Hilton
#11. I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.
Malala Yousafzai
#12. Don't thank me,' Mr. Curtain called as the door slid closed. 'Impress me!
Trenton Lee Stewart
#13. I don't trust people to accept who I am in process. I'm the kind of person who wants to present my most honest, authentic self to the world - so I hide backstage and rehearse honest and authentic lines until the curtain opens.
Donald Miller
#14. I see no light behind that terrible curtain. I do not think one religion better than another and I think the Christian religion has brought far more misery crime and suffering far more tyranny and evil than any other.
Eliza Lynn Linton
#15. Yes, there is plenty of hard work for them in addition to that which they do when they appear, smiling and happy, when the curtain goes up. Giving a performance is the least of their worries.
Florenz Ziegfeld
#16. A thin yellow curtain hung in front of the corner window as boney tree limbs tapped on the glass like an unwelcome visitor. Despite the tiny buds on the trees outside, the branch at this particular window was still bare.
Abby Slovin
#17. ... the rain was a fine thing. She often preferred it to the warm slant of sun and the clear brilliance of cloudless blue skies. The rain was a soft gray curtain, tucking her away from the world.
Nora Roberts
#18. 19 We have this hope as an anchor for our lives, safe and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain.
Anonymous
#19. Obviously some cheap motel is missing a shower curtain.
Bobby Heenan
#20. It is the face of his own evil shadow that grins at Western man from the other side of the Iron curtain.
C. G. Jung
#21. An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house.
Maria Callas
#22. On the other side of the curtain, two separate wars were being fought. One was to save the life of a women who'd been beaten to near death by her husband. The other was to allow her child to have any kind of a life at all.
Jodi Picoult
#23. It wasn't until 'Smokey Joe's' came out that I actually got to step out from behind the curtain and meet our 'fans.'
Mike Stoller
#24. It's nowhere near as intense as what I imagine an actor experiences backstage, but I feel a fluttering nervousness before a curtain goes up on a play. I mean, any play, anywhere - on Broadway or the Bowery or in a church basement.
Ben Brantley
#25. How much cooler was Oz than seeing the little dude behind the curtain?
Emile Hirsch
#26. He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain - no matter what - after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods.
Kate Chopin
#27. Escape the safety of the small by taking the risks to become part of something bigger. Your true self demands it. Listen for the timer on the oven to sound-that's when the memory curtain parts, flashing moments that really mattered.
Kirby Wright
#28. It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theater. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act.
Victor Hugo
#29. What had happened would always be part of us, but we'd survived it. We were still here. The curtain would fall ons us eventually, but I would fight to keep it up as long as I could. For now it was just us, together, and there was nothing in our way.
Michelle Hodkin
#30. Most of [her ashes] fell into the river in a long gray curtain. But some was caught by the wind and blown upward toward the blue spring sky where it swirled a moment in the air, before dissolving into sunlight.
Kimberly Cutter
#31. My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea, and my eyes are the color of water.
Anais Nin
#32. Coming home seemed to have started the healing process. No longer vivid and garish, the memories seemed to be covered in gossemer, fading behind a curtain of time and forgiveness.
Karen Fowler
#33. It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#34. If you come within two feet of this curtain, I will poke out your eyes while you sleep.
Jamie McGuire
#35. Try and stay sober. Until the curtain call. And for God's sake, have fun. Don't suffer for your art. Just have fun.
Christopher Plummer
#36. Theatre is filled w/ passion, risk and drama (as much behind-the-curtain as on stage), perfect ingredients for documentary storytelling.
Dori Berinstein
#37. The wind languished. The floral curtain ceased flapping. The moonlight streamed through, lighting up her face. It was a young, animated face. At that moment, it touched a string, a peg, deep inside him.
Qiu Xiaolong
#38. Until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
George Santayana
#39. I don't like when actors go around and talk a ton about how they approach their roles, because it's a little like pulling the curtain back on Oz, for me.
Jim Parrack
#40. When the curtain falls, the best thing an actor can do is to go away.
Harold Macmillan
#41. My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
T. S. Eliot
#42. Ke$ha is her art; there is no curtain you peel back to find the real person. And with Ke$ha, you never know what to expect when you're in the studio.
Benny Blanco
#43. Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal darkness buries all.
Alexander Pope
#44. I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.
Bob Dylan
#45. Death's not one of those things that frighten the life out of me. Getting up on stage with the curtain going up frightens me more.
Billie Whitelaw
#46. It is useless to put news agency stories behind the paid curtain because they are available in thousands of other places that will be free.
Robert G. Picard
#47. Eight: the age of exploration, of ghosts and secret forays; the age at which a mystery lurks behind every curtain and every armoire opens into a magical world, which you may enter at any time, but who knows when you will return.
Carmen Posadas
#48. south, moving slowly. It looked something like a huge blue-gray shower curtain being drawn along by the hand of God. You could just barely see through it, enough to make
Barbara Kingsolver
#49. The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.
C.S. Lewis
#50. The terror takes you. The cage is locked and the curtain drawn. Fingers dance along as blades, carving memories into your flesh that will leave scars long past being healed.
Amanda Steele
#51. Anyways, the Russians, no longer Red, are in the red - which, after throwing off the shackles of communism, is like having an irony curtain descend on them.
Steve Mirsky
#52. Behind the curtain's mystic fold The glowing future lies unrolled.
Neil Gaiman
#53. There's the fatigue that you have to forget about, because the red curtain still has to rise.
Mireille Mathieu
#54. It was my mother who taught me the one worthwhile thing: when they ask if you like what you see in the mirror, pretend that what they mean is what's behind you
the shower curtain, the tile, the wallpaper, whatever's there.
Gary Lutz
#55. It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power.
Raymond Carver
#56. The idea that the curtain rises on what is often more or less a happy scene, and it will fall just a few hours later, and everyone will be dead or have gone mad ... I find that kind of narrative very appealing.
Daniel Handler
#57. 'Billy Elliot' prides itself on being a family show, and it made sense to specifically cater to a family audience with an earlier evening curtain time.
Eric Fellner
#58. I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain - that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep.
Mike White
#59. I stay awake all night. My knees curled up to my chin, my arms wrapped tight around my small frame, my long brown hair the only curtain between us.
Tahereh Mafi
#60. I learned that music comes from the voice, the rhythm and the heart of each person, and that the musicality of those unrecorded melodies could lift the curtain of fog, pass through windows and screens to waken us as gently as a morning lullaby.
Kim Thuy
#61. Before Enron, I think people were a bit more naive about the way things worked, and I think Enron pulled the curtain back on unsavoury practices that turned out to be a lot more widespread.
Bethany McLean
#63. People Power is too often an inverted fairy story - the triumph of innocence coming at the start and the Ugly Sisters of intrigue and ambition coming on stage in triumph for the final curtain.
Mark Almond
#64. Old Year! upon the Stage of Time You stand to bow your last adieu; A moment, and the prompter's chime Will ring the curtain down on you.
Robert W. Service
#65. I feel like a curtain has dropped away and i'm seeing people for who they really are, different, and sharp, and unknowable.
Lauren Oliver
#66. The door moved aside like a curtain, revealing a scene that would be embedded on my memory for always. It would change everything. Ruin everything. Break everything.
Tarryn Fisher
#67. Thank you, Severus," said Dumbledore firmly, and Snape went quiet, though his eyes still glinted malevolently through his curtain of greasy black hair.
J.K. Rowling
#68. Let the thick curtain fall;I better know than allHow little I have gained,How vast the unattained.
John Greenleaf Whittier
#69. This scepticism is the same scepticism I heard a generation ago in the USSR when few thought that a democratic transformation behind the iron curtain was possible.
Natan Sharansky
#70. Where were we?" she said.
"Getting credit," I said.
"What about it?"
"Well, it's nice to get credit."
The spokes of her rear wheel spun behind the curtain of her long skirt. She looked like a photograph from a hundred years ago. She turned her wide eyes on me. "Is it?" she said.
Jerry Spinelli
#71. In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.
Herbie Hancock
#72. My proudest moment of my career was opening night in Cambridge and watching the cast take their curtain call. No one was looking at me, and I was floating off the ground. It was just euphoric.
Sara Bareilles
#73. Poetry! Indeed, verses are the only thing that your letter lacks, Makar Alexievitch. And what tender feelings I can read in it - what roseate-coloured fancies! To the curtain, however, I had never given a thought. The fact is that when I moved the flower-pots, it LOOPED ITSELF up. There now!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#74. If it's true we only live once, then raise your red velvet curtain every chance you get.
Gina Greenlee
#75. I wrote somewhere during the Cold War that I sometimes wish the Iron Curtain were much taller than it is, so that you could see whether the development of science with no communication was parallel on the two sides. In this case it certainly wasn't.
Thomas Gold
#76. For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.
Mitch Albom
#77. I'll give you my worst nightmare. I'm dreaming that I'm onstage, the curtain goes up, and I have no idea what my lines are or what's going on. I think I should know, I kind of know, I remember rehearsing ... and the audience is there waiting.
Jackie Earle Haley
#78. Each successive Labour Government has been the most rapacious, doctrinaire and unpatriotic conspiracy to be seen this side of the Iron Curtain.
Roy Jenkins
#79. I remember when I was doing 'The Crucible' on Broadway with Laura Linney, and Arthur Miller had been in rehearsal with us and was on stage on opening night. She turned to me during the curtain call and said, 'Let's make sure we remember this.'
John Benjamin Hickey
#80. The horrors of the Second World War, the chilling winds of the Cold War and the crushing weight of the Iron Curtain are little more than fading memories. Ideals that once commanded great loyalty are now taken for granted.
Jan Peter Balkenende
#81. When Joan Rivers walked through the curtain on 'The Tonight Show,' nobody in my house was allowed to utter a sound. Her gait was full of pep and purpose and her voice unmatched.
Judy Gold
#82. In my stand-up, I've always been loose. If there's a curtain onstage, I'll use that in my act. If there's a door, I'll use the door. I always like to use everything at my disposal, which makes each show a little different and a little more fun.
J. B. Smoove
#83. There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs forever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real.
E. Nesbit
#84. The road passed through a curtain of pine forest and came out on a flat, rolling snow field. In this field the sprawled or bunched bodies of Germans lay thick, like some dark shapeless vegetable.
Martha Gellhorn
#85. And now, the end is near,
And so I face the final curtain.
My friend, I'll say it clear,
I'll state my case, of which I'm certain.
I've lived a life that's full.
I've traveled each and every highway;
And more, much more than this,
I did it my way.
Jacques Revaux
#86. The Eurythmics were back on the charts. Dirty Dancing was at the box office. The Iron curtain was still standing. Margaret Thatcher had been re-elected for a third term. There we were, back in 1987.
Nicola Lagioia
#87. People say I was made for this
Nothin' else would I trade for this
And just think I get paid for this...
Bobby Darin
#88. On the other side of the curtain, children were squabbling, a baby was crying, and there was the smell of rat-and-cabbage casserole. Someone was sharpening an axe. And someone else was snoring. For a dwarf in Ankh-Morpork, solitude was something that you had to cultivate on the inside. Books
Terry Pratchett
#89. Like Johns, I am one of the little men, not interested in ideologies, tied to a flat Cambridgeshire landscape, a chalk quarry, a line of willows across the featureless fields, a market town
his thoughts scrabbled at the curtain
where he used to dance at the Saturday hops.
Graham Greene
#90. When twilight drops her curtain down And pins it with a star Remember that you have a friend Though she may wander far.
L.M. Montgomery
#91. There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#92. God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.
Jerry Falwell
#93. The planes struck, tearing through the curtain of that blue September morning, exposing the dark world that lay right behind it, of populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for change to happen by.
Deborah Eisenberg
#94. Should the German people lay down their arms, the Soviets ... would occupy all eastern and south-eastern Europe, together with the greater part of the [German] Reich. All over this territory, which would be of an enormous extent, an iron curtain would at once descend.
Joseph Goebbels
#95. Whether you win or not, the night the Oscars are over, the curtain goes down and you go back to the grind. Period.
Marcia Gay Harden
#96. As the moon retaineth her nature, though darkness spread itself before her face as a curtain, so the Soul remaineth perfect even in the bosom of the fool.
Akhenaton
#97. Yes, our old age is not going to be sunny orchard drowse. By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry? Why indeed? (24 December 1940)
Virginia Woolf
#98. I miss theater. I miss living the arc of the character, from curtain to curtain, and I miss the immediate audience response.
David Anders
#99. Here was food for reflection: Kitty had never heard the Chinese spoken of as anything but decadent, dirty, and unspeakable. It was as though the corner of a curtain were lifted for a moment, and she caught a glimpse of a world rich with a color and significance she had not dreamt of.
W. Somerset Maugham
#100. I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.
Ian McEwan
