Sarah Ruhl Quotes

If the proper audience for poetry is God, then the proper audience for the novel is people. Plays have both stories and poetry. Therefore the proper audience for plays is: people and God. But: what is the audience for poetry in a godless universe? The audience for poetry in a godless universe is the academy. Or perhaps: other poets and therefore God? And what is the proper audience for plays in a godless universe? Is there no proper audience for plays in a godless universe? Must we invent our own gods?

Hands are difficult. You would think they would be just five quick lines, but no, they have personalities as intimate as faces. Elizabeth's hands, for instance — they are fine hands, with long fingers that remind me of tapered candles. A person one has loved — the memory of their hands. Did they flutter or sit still? Dry? Moist? Cool on a hot forehead? What? That is what I wish to express in my paintings. The memory — of the movement — of very particular hands, even though they appear to be unmoving on canvas.

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.

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?

Dear Hermia. I know we haven’t always connected, every second of the day. Husbands and wives seldom do. The joy between husband and wife is elusive, but it is strong. It endures countless moments of silent betrayal, navigates complicated labyrinths of emotional retreats. I know that sometimes you were somewhere else when we made love. I was, too. But in those moments of climax, when the darkness descended, and our fantasies dissolved into the air under the quickening heat of our desire — then, then, we were in that room together. And that is all that matters. Love, Gordon.

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.

I think a person has to believe in something,
or search out some kind of faith;
otherwise life is empty, nothing.
How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly,
why children are born, why there are stars in the sky...
Either you know why you live,
or it's all small, unnecessary bits.

Play itself is a primary process, not a luxury, not a hobby, but something all children must do to survive into adulthood.

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

Certain brands of guilt can be inculcated in a secular way but other brands of guilt can only be obtained with reference to the metaphysical.

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.

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.” — Sarah Ruhl

When you snatch happiness in little bits, fits and starts, and lose it, like me, you become coarse, little by little, you become hateful.

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 once was a very great American surgeon named Halsted. He was married to a nurse. He loved her — immeasurably. One day Halsted noticed that his wife’s hands were chapped and red when she came back from surgery. And so he invented rubber gloves. For her. It is one of the great love stories in medicine. The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.
When I met Ana, I knew:
I loved her to the point of invention.