Sarah Ruhl Quotes

There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me (truly you have not lived until you have changed one baby’s diaper while another baby quietly vomits on your shin) and finally I came to the thought: all right, then, annihilate me, that other self was a fiction anyhow.

And I think, as I’m surrounded by teeming life — parasites, fish, and children — I think, So, you thought you wanted to observe life? Motherhood shakes her head, clenches her fists, and demands, No, you must live it.

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

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?

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

There was an abundance of sweetness. But I often felt I was observing it from a distance, rather than participating in the sweetness.

ORPHEUS: How will you remember?

EURYDICE: That I love you?

ORPHEUS: Yes.

EURYDICE: That's easy. I can't help it.

Put the bad poetry in the mouths of outlandish characters. It might make bad poetry funny instead of sad.

Narrative is an accumulation of knowledge about the future. We begin in the present and end in the present, and in the middle is an accumulation of future possibilities

A girl, a woman who is two-thirds done, is nearer to God. A young woman on the verge of knowing herself is the most attractive thing on this earth to a man for this very reason.

Love is unbounded by time

We need Harry Potter.

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.

Certain brands of guilt can be inculcated in a secular way but other brands of guilt can only be obtained with reference to the metaphysical.

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?