Top 100 Eugene O'neill Quotes
#1. Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you start a play and you type 'Act one, scene one,' your writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill or anyone. It's that fifth word where amateurs start to go wrong.
Meredith Willson
#2. Abysmal vermin that I am, I couldn't of course tell her that it was her incredible mother that I wanted to see again ... I knew only as I drove through the cold, night autumn air that somewhere Freud, Sophocles and Eugene O'Neill were laughing.
Woody Allen
#3. When authorities learned that Eugene O'Neill's play All God's Chillun proposed to show black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the police to stop it.
Bill Bryson
#4. If I had my choice in life I would have had the gifts of Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill. Unfortunately my gifts lie in comedy and so comedy comes fairly easy to me and I occasionally have an idea for a very serious piece and I do it, but the ideas don't come that readily to me.
Woody Allen
#5. John Coltrane was an addict; Billie Holiday was an addict; Eugene O'Neill was an addict. What would America be without addicts and post-addicts who make such grand contributions to our society?
Cornel West
#6. I was born in Newton, MA. Graduated from Brown University in 2001 with honors in English as a playwright. I attended the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O'Neill Center in Waterford, CT just after Brown. I moved to NYC in 2002 and was a professional ... waiter, for 3 years.
John Krasinski
#7. In his play "Long Day's Journey into Night, " Eugene O'Neill has one of his characters utter a powerful statement toward the end of her life: "None of us can help the things life has done to us. They are done before you realize it and once they are done, they make you do other things, until at
Ravi Zacharias
#8. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#9. [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.
Eugene O'Neill
#10. We fought so long against small things that we became small ourselves.
Eugene O'Neill
#11. Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Eugene O'Neill
#13. But land is land, and it's safer than the stocks and bonds of Wall Street swindlers.
Eugene O'Neill
#14. Any fool knows that to work hard at something you want to accomplish is the only way to be happy.
Eugene O'Neill
#15. Happy roads is bunk. Weary roads is right. Get you nowhere fast. That's where I've got - nowhere. Where everyone lands in the end, even if most of the suckers won't admit it.
Eugene O'Neill
#16. He thinks money spent on a home is money wasted. He's lived too much in hotels. Never the best hotels, of course. Second-rate hotels. He doesn't understand a home. He doesn't feel at home in it. And yet, he wants a home. He's even proud of having this shabby place. He loves it here.
Eugene O'Neill
#17. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#18. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#19. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#20. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#21. Dey's some things I don't got to be told. I kin read them in folks' eyes.
Eugene O'Neill
#22. 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. I will always love you as only a dog can.
Eugene O'Neill
#23. God gave us mouths that close and ears that don't ... that should tell us something.
Eugene O'Neill
#24. It wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. [ ... ] It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more.
Eugene O'Neill
#25. LAVINIA: I love everything that grows simply
up toward the sun
everything that's straight and strong! I hate what's warped and twists and eats into itself and dies for a lifetime in shadow ...
Eugene O'Neill
#26. There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.
Eugene O'Neill
#27. The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us.
Eugene O'Neill
#28. No dog is as well bred or as well mannered or as distinguished and handsome.
Eugene O'Neill
#29. I'm thinking 'tis only slaves do be giving heed to the day that's gone or the day to come.
Eugene O'Neill
#30. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#31. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#33. Those who succeed and do not push on to greater failure are the spiritual middle-classers.
Eugene O'Neill
#35. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#36. One should either be sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.
Eugene O'Neill
#37. 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!
Eugene O'Neill
#38. HOGAN-No, I wouldn't think it, but my motto in life is never trust anyone too far, not even myself.
Eugene O'Neill
#39. 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 always be a little in love with death.
Eugene O'Neill
#40. While you are still beautiful and life still woos, it is such a fine gesture of disdainful pride to jilt it.
Eugene O'Neill
#43. 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!
Eugene O'Neill
#44. I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room - and God damn it - died in a hotel room.
Eugene O'Neill
#45. The devil! what beastly things our memories insist on cherishing!
Eugene O'Neill
#46. And I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance.
Eugene O'Neill
#47. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#48. We need above all to learn again to believe in the possibility of nobility of spirit in ourselves.
Eugene O'Neill
#49. Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
Eugene O'Neill
#50. You can't be too careful about work. It's the most dangerous habit known to medical science.
Eugene O'Neill
#51. 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 ...
Eugene O'Neill
#52. Dalmatians are not only superior to other dogs, they are like all dogs, infinitely less stupid than men.
Eugene O'Neill
#53. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#54. Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.
Eugene O'Neill
#55. Life is a long drawn out lie, with a sniffling sigh at the end of it.
Eugene O'Neill
#56. 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?
Eugene O'Neill
#57. God damn you, stop shoving your rotten soul in my lap!
Eugene O'Neill
#59. We are such things as rubbish is made of, so let's drink up and forget it.
Eugene O'Neill
#61. I discovered early in life that living frightened me when I was sober.
Eugene O'Neill
#63. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#64. 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
#65. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#68. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#69. Stay passed out, that's the right dope. There ain't any cool willow trees- except you grow your own in a bottle.
Eugene O'Neill
#71. Our lives are merely strange dark interludes in the electric display of God the Father.
Eugene O'Neill
#73. Well, you wanted me to be a hero in blue, so you better be resigned! Murdering doesn't improve one's manners!
Eugene O'Neill
#74. Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
Eugene O'Neill
#75. When I was a kid I used to get fun out of my horrors.
Eugene O'Neill
#76. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#77. What beastly incidents our memories insist on cherishing, the ugly, and the disgusting; the beautiful things we have to keep diaries to remember.
Eugene O'Neill
#78. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#79. I am so far from being a pessimist ... on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.
Eugene O'Neill
#80. If that ghost have money I tells him never to haunt you
less'n he wants to lose it!
Eugene O'Neill
#81. 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
#82. Curiosity killed the cat, and satisfaction brought it back.
Eugene O'Neill
#83. Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid of love, I who love love?.. Why was I born without a skin, O God, that I must wear armor in order to touch or to be touched?
Eugene O'Neill
#85. What's the use coming home to get the blues over what can't be helped.
Eugene O'Neill
#86. 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?
Eugene O'Neill
#88. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for time.
Eugene O'Neill
#89. You'll say to yourself, I'm just an old man who is scared of life, but even more scared of dying. So I'm keeping drunk and hanging on to life at any price, and what of it?
Eugene O'Neill
#90. You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.
Eugene O'Neill
#91. Where am I? What the hell difference is it? There's plenty o' fresh air and the moon fur a glim. Don't be so damn pertic'lar!
Eugene O'Neill
#92. Life is perhaps best regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings.
Eugene O'Neill
#93. 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.
Eugene O'Neill
#94. Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.
Eugene O'Neill
#96. That's right! Run him down! Run down everybody! Everyone is a fake to you!
Eugene O'Neill
#97. On my solemn oath, Edmund, I'd gladly face not having an acre of land to call my own, nor a penny in the bank, I'd be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age, if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been.
Eugene O'Neill
#98. LAVINIA: I want to feel love! Love is all beautiful! I never used to know that! I was a fool! We'll be married soon ... We'll make an island for ourselves on land and we'll have children and love them and teach them to love life so that they can never be possessed by hate and death!
Eugene O'Neill
#99. One may not give one's soul to a devil of hate - and remain forever scatheless.
Eugene O'Neill
#100. We are where centuries only count as seconds, and after a thousand lives, our eyes begin to open.
Eugene O'Neill
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