Sarah Ruhl Quotes

I think there has never been a more misunderstood phrase than drama is conflict, conflict is drama. Instead of thinking of conflict, I like to think of dialectic, a need for opposites that undermine each other. Or, I think about the need for contrast in painting. Paintings don't need large family fights and mudslinging, but they do need contrasts of color and shade. Of course, watching people insulting other people is entertaining, as are arm wrestling, bearbaiting, and the like. But I'm not sure that it's necessary to the drama, for drama is also a spectacle, A thing of interesrt, a thing happening , an event eventing, which us not necessarily a thing fighting. Though fighting can certainly be dramatic, it is not a necessary precondition to the dramatic.

The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.

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

We need Harry Potter.

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?

Listen to her the way you would listen
to your own daughter
if she died too young
and tried to speak to you
across long distances.

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.

You're very comforting, I don't know why. You're like a very small casserole – has anyone ever told you that?

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.

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.

Mothers and daughters: two circles, and the all-important bounded sections where they are complete unto themselves. Daughters perhaps have a tendency to point at the differences, mothers to point at the commonalities.

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.

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?

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.

Do you not think, Mrs. Givings, that snow is always kind? Because it has to fall slowly, to meet the ground slowly, or the eyelash slowly — And things that meet each other slowly are kind.