Quotes

Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.

Marriage is the price men pay for sex; sex is the price women pay for marriage.

The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.

Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.

Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

I hold that we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.

Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense.

The most valuable thing I inherited was a temperament that does not revolt against Necessity and that is constantly renewed in Hope.

I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for - whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.

Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.

The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape.

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?

The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous... and the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight.

The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, "Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home." And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.

I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.

Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.

Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.

On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being.

Winning children, who appear so guileless, are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.

We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.

The theater is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are." Yet most dramatists employ it to say: "This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action."

The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.

A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference and a longer view and finds them incongruous. It dampens enthusiasm; it mocks hope. It pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation.

A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.

"Our Town" is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village or as a speculation about the condition of life after death. It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our life.

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.

Imagination draws on memory. Memory and imagination combined can stage a Servants' Ball or even write a book, if that's what they want to do.