Sarah Ruhl Quotes

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.

Don't make a wall of glass between your play and the people watching. Don't forget they were once children, who enjoyed being read to, or sung to sleep.

ORPHEUS: How will you remember?

EURYDICE: That I love you?

ORPHEUS: Yes.

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

"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.

Love is unbounded by time

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

What we think of as the soul is just a mingling of genetics and our parents, in my case, slowly torturing me, or in your case giving you complete unconditional love.

She has a quiet paroxysm.
Now remember that these are the days
before digital pornography.
There is no cliché of how women are supposed to orgasm,
no idea in their heads of how they are supposed to sound when they climax.
Mrs. Daldry’s first orgasms could be very quiet,
organic, awkward, primal. Or very clinical. Or embarrassingly natural.
But whatever it is, it should not be a cliché, a camp version
of how we expect all women sound when they orgasm.
It is simply clear that she has had some kind of release.

Titles by their nature imply that the play’s architecture is like a bull’s-eye (and some are) with the point being in the center. Sometimes the point is in the margins, or in the experience of throwing the dart.

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.

What silly little things sometimes take on meaning in life, suddenly, out of nowhere. And you know they're little nothings, and you laugh at them, but all the same, you go on feeling them, you can't stop...

No extra hospital words. I don't want a relationship with disease. I want to have a relationship with death. That's important. But to have a relationship with disease — that's some kind of bourgeoisie invention. And I hate it.

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