Sarah Ruhl Quotes

I think a person has to believe in something,
or search out some kind of faith;
otherwise life is empty, nothing.
How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly,
why children are born, why there are stars in the sky...
Either you know why you live,
or it's all small, unnecessary bits.

A suspicion that lightness is not deeply serious (but instead whimsical) pervades aesthetic discourse. But what if lightness is a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper the intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor.

No, you're not. If you were really sorry, you wouldn't have done it. We do as we please, and then say we're sorry. But we're not sorry. We're just uncomfortable — watching other people in pain.

Shame is an odd emotion. It clings to things over which we have no control, like a scent.

Oh, where is it, where did my past go, when I was young, happy and intelligent, when my dreams and thoughts had some grace, and the present and future were lit up with hope? Why is it, that when we've just started to live, we grow dull, gray, uninteresting, lazy, useless, with flattened-out souls?

Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music.

I hate parties.
And a wedding is the biggest party of all.
All the guests arrived and Orpheus is taking a shower.
He's always taking a shower when the guests arrive so he doesn't have to greet them.
Then I have to greet them.

A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day.

I always thought there would be more interesting people at my wedding.

It's this feeling that you want to love strangers, that you want to kiss the man at the post office, or the woman at the dry cleaners - you want to wrap you arms around life, life itself, but you can't and this feeling wells up in you, and there is nowhere to put this great happiness - and you're floating - and then you fall down and become unbearably sad. And you have to go lie down on the couch.

ORPHEUS: How will you remember?

EURYDICE: That I love you?

ORPHEUS: Yes.

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

Don't make a wall of glass between your play and the people watching. Don't forget they were once children, who enjoyed being read to, or sung to sleep.

And in this day and age, we sometimes seem to care more about the record of joy than the experience of joy itself.

Every day as I wave to my children when I drop them off at school, or let one of them have a new experience — like crossing the street without holding my hand — I experience the struggle between love and non-attachment. It is hard to bear — the extreme love of one’s child and the thought that ultimately the child belongs to the world. There is this horrible design flaw — children are supposed to grow up and away from you; and one of you will die first.

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?

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.

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.