Sarah Ruhl Quotes

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

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

I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much.

But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats.

This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.

Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing.

American actors are taught to have objectives — what does your character want from the other character? That is business. When I deal with other people, I don’t want something from them; I want a rapport. Some people say that’s an objective — it’s not — it’s a sensation of well-being. Life is not constantly about wanting to get something from somebody else. Life is about pleasure.” I hope, dear Irene, that you are in a sensation of well-being

The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.