Sarah Ruhl Quotes

The importance of knowing nothing is underrated.

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.

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.

What is easily understood by a five-year-old — that language invents worlds — is assumed by producers to be intellectually ungraspable by an audience of well-educated grown-ups, who, it is thought, need to see spigots and so forth to represent kitchens, because holding up a mirror to nature — or the sink — is thought to be transcendent.

If more women knew more jokes, there would be more justice in the world.

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

A perfect joke is somewhere between an angel and a fart.

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.

You say a prayer, Virginia. A prayer cleans the air the way water cleans the dirt.

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.

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

What we think of as the soul is just a mingling of genetics and our parents, in my case, slowly torturing me, or in your case giving you complete unconditional love.

We need Harry Potter.

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

When I am not paying attention to my children, they appear to desperately need it. When I am giving them my full attention, they seem just as happy to play by themselves. It is as though they need to be certain of my attention in order to play their own games and ignore me.