Sarah Ruhl Quotes

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.

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

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

The word quirky is so much more loathed than the word whimsy that it does not bear the time it would require to dissect its horrors. The choice to have a perceptible aesthetic at all is often called a quirk. The word quirky suggests that in a homogenized culture, difference has to be immediately defined, sequestered, and formally quarantined while being gently patted on the head.

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.

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.

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

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

"the theater is one of the few places left in the bright and noisy world where we sit in the quiet dark together, to be awake."

Ruhl, Sarah. 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater (p. 103). Faber & Faber. Kindle Edition.

This was the house that Paula had taken me and two other graduate students to years earlier. She had told us to go out on the deck, look at the view of the Atlantic Ocean, and say to ourselves, This is what playwriting can buy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

the theater is one of the few places left in the bright and noisy world where we sit in the quiet dark together, to be awake.