Sarah Ruhl Quotes

I see it as my job to mourn him until the day I die.

the theater is one of the few places left in the bright and noisy world where we sit in the quiet dark together, to be awake.

Motherhood is a predicament. How to live fully inside of it with any grace?

I've never been in love, never in my life.
Oh, I've dreamed of love, dreamed endlessly, day and night,
but my soul is like a fine piano that's locked,
and the key is lost.

Is this all we've got now? No priests to say yes son, your suffering meant something, no kings on the battlefield to say yes soldier, your suffering meant something.

There’s a word in Japanese for being sad in the springtime – a whole word for just being sad – about how pretty the flowers are and how soon they’re going to die.” — Sarah Ruhl

Small, forthright words, used in the service of condensing experience, might have an idea buried in them as large as the most expansive work that wears its intellectualism on its sleeve. The unshed tears of the deeply felt are akin to the unused large words in the service of a thought.

When you read a novel, it seems that everything is clear, trite and understandable. But when you yourself fall in love, you understand that nobody knows anything and everyone must decide for themselves.

I wonder how it is that we are all connected despite our tremendous differences.

That is why they have poets — to classify all the degrees of love. It is for scientists to classify the maladies arising from the want of it.

Can the theater teach us to wait? To forestall our satisfaction? Poems teach us how to wait. The natural world makes us wait. Erik Satie teaches us how to wait. And so does much music. Will YouTube teach us how to wait? Will YouTube teach us how to die?

People talk about cancer like it’s this special thing you have a relationship with. And it becomes blood count, biopsy, chemotherapy, radiation, bone marrow, blah blah blah blah blah. As long as I live I want to retain my own language.
Mientras tengo vida, quiero procurar mantener mi proprio idioma.

No extra hospital words. I don’t want a relationship with a disease. I want to have a relationship with death. That’s important. But to have a relationship with a disease — that’s some kind of bourgeois invention. And I hate it.

Perhaps we would have more sublime plays if we had more tolerance for and interest in imperfect plays. Because perfect plays are not sublime plays. Shakespeare's plays are weird and wonky and oddly shaped and wonderfully imperfect but sublime. They are as untidy men lime as nature is. Contemporary playwrights are often encouraged to make tidy plays rather than plays with cliffs and torrents

Titles by their nature imply that the play’s architecture is like a bull’s-eye (and some are) with the point being in the center. Sometimes the point is in the margins, or in the experience of throwing the dart.

Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it — I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song?