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.

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.

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

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.

No, you're not. If you were really sorry, you wouldn't have done it. We do as we please, and then say we're sorry. But we're not sorry. We're just uncomfortable — watching other people in pain.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Being insulted by your child and loving them anyway is the human condition.

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

There was a time, when I first found out I was pregnant with twins, that I saw only a state of conflict. When I looked at theater and parenthood, I saw only war, competing loyalties, and I thought my writing life was over. 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. And then I could breathe. I could investigate the pauses. I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is also 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.

ORPHEUS: How will you remember?

EURYDICE: That I love you?

ORPHEUS: Yes.

EURYDICE: That's easy. I can't help it.

I've never been in love, never in my life.
Oh, I've dreamed of love, dreamed endlessly, day and night,
but my soul is like a fine piano that's locked,
and the key is lost.