Sarah Ruhl Quotes

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

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

She runs, trips and pitches down the stairs, holding her letter.
She follows the letter down, down...
Blackout. A clatter. Strange sounds — xylophones, brass bands, sounds of falling, sounds of vertigo.
Sounds of breathing.

When diseases and stories are chronic, doctors and writers often both run for the hills

Be suspicious of an expert who tells you to cut a seemingly unnecessary moment out of your play. The soul of your play may reside there, quietly, inconspicuously, clothing in its unnecessariness, shining forth in its lack of necessity to be.

But don’t we need to cross over? Is this not a moral imperative for art, but also for social discourse? Don’t we need to imagine people different from ourselves, people whose experiences we can only imagine?

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?

I think maybe heaven is a sea of untranslatable jokes. Only everyone is laughing.

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.

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

What silly little things sometimes take on meaning in life, suddenly, out of nowhere. And you know they're little nothings, and you laugh at them, but all the same, you go on feeling them, you can't stop...

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.

The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.

Then she said, “Your plays balance on air I mean they are air I mean they are performed in air so they are air. “If a whole city could balance on a seed then a city could balance on a play because a play is air and everything is air. “Your next play should be about a seed because a seed is smaller than an almond. Or maybe your next play should be smaller than an almond, about nothing, about air.

Dear Hermia. I know we haven’t always connected, every second of the day. Husbands and wives seldom do. The joy between husband and wife is elusive, but it is strong. It endures countless moments of silent betrayal, navigates complicated labyrinths of emotional retreats. I know that sometimes you were somewhere else when we made love. I was, too. But in those moments of climax, when the darkness descended, and our fantasies dissolved into the air under the quickening heat of our desire — then, then, we were in that room together. And that is all that matters. Love, Gordon.