Best 51 quotes of Sarah Ruhl on MyQuotes

Sarah Ruhl

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    Sarah Ruhl

    A multivalent culture is an amazing place to be writing theatre.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    Art is a way of freezing time, or extending time. ... It's another way to bridge the gaps between us.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    Attachment parenting is this theory that if you wear your baby around and you sleep with your baby and you breast-feed for a long time, the baby will be more attached to you.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    Being dead is the most airtight defense of one's own aesthetic.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    Have you ever been so melancholy, that you wanted to fit in the palm of your beloved's hand? And lie there, for fortnights, or decades, or the length of time between stars? In complete silence?

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    Sarah Ruhl

    I don't read a word that's written about me. I don't read my own interviews. I don't read reviews. I think it would drive me insane.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    I do think there's a relationship between a book and a reader that's more intimate, in many ways, than the relationship between an audience member and a play - just by the nature of it being an object that you can have in bed with you and that you can keep and page through.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    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.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    In America I think it's much more full of disruption culturally; it's much more mysterious how we inherit culture here. We grab it where we can find it - we're insatiable - and there can be a sense here that it's not available to you as readily as it is in other cultures.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    I see, in women friends, a really dangerous phenomenon where it seems they reach a certain age and become invisible.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    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.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    I think theatre is a democratic act and I think writing a play is not a democratic act. I think we should give writers more leeway and space to write the thing they want to write, and then we should produce the play, multiple times, and let them re-write it.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    I think you have to have your own expectations of yourself and your own sense of purpose and your own intrinsic pleasure in the task. If you don't, you will drive yourself off a cliff because your fortunes will rise and fall, and if you identify too closely with that, you really will go insane.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life. Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    It's a privilege to have kids and not live your life in solitude. But we live in a child-hating culture.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    It was important to me that people know that you can make plays and raise children at the same time - for other mothers, for other parents, for other women considering having children and who want to be working and thinking and contemplating and making things while they're raising children.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    I used to paint and I used to draw, and I probably would have loved to have been a portrait painter if I'd been good enough, but I really wasn't good enough.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    I would never be essentialist about sexuality and structure, but I do think there's a way in which this male-arc has been talked about as the only structure, and kind of a stand-in for even the word structure, instead of looking at other forms.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    No one likes kids. We say we do, and we take pictures of pregnant women for People Magazine, but really they're commodities - we hate them around, we hate them on airplanes, we consider them a grand imposition and almost a style choice.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    Plays are architecture, and you can make them stand in many ways that are hard to describe. And, I think, in our limited ability to describe them, we've substituted our inarticulateness for saying that there's one and only one structure.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    Sitting down with younger women writers and saying, "This is what I do and you can do this" is hugely important.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    Theatre is, at its roots, some very brave people mutually consenting to a make believe world, with nothing but language to rest on.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    The director was only invented in the nineteenth century. So directors have only been around for 200 year,s and playwrights have been around since Sophocles and Euripides.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    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.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    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.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    We all exist in relation to the world, our partners, the human race.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    What I really value about being a writer is that I can go to rehearsal when I want to, and then, when I need to be at home writing or with my kids, I go home.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    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.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it—I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song?

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    Sarah Ruhl

    Every day as I wave to my children when I drop them off at school, or let one of them have a new experience—like crossing the street without holding my hand—I experience the struggle between love and non-attachment. It is hard to bear—the extreme love of one’s child and the thought that ultimately the child belongs to the world. There is this horrible design flaw—children are supposed to grow up and away from you; and one of you will die first.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    I always thought there would be more interesting people at my wedding.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    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.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    I hate parties. And a wedding is the biggest party of all. All the guests arrived and Orpheus is taking a shower. He's always taking a shower when the guests arrive so he doesn't have to greet them. Then I have to greet them. A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day. I always thought there would be more interesting people at my wedding.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    I hate parties. And a wedding is the biggest party of all. All the guests arrived and Orpheus is taking a shower. He's always taking a shower when the guests arrive so he doesn't have to greet them. Then I have to greet them.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    I have loved enough women to know how to paint. If I had loved fewer, I would be an illustrator; if I had loved more, I would be a poet.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    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.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    I wonder how it is that we are all connected despite our tremendous differences.

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    Sarah Ruhl

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

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    Sarah Ruhl

    Oh, where is it, where did my past go, when I was young, happy and intelligent, when my dreams and thoughts had some grace, and the present and future were lit up with hope? Why is it, that when we've just started to live, we grow dull, gray, uninteresting, lazy, useless, with flattened-out souls?

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    Sarah Ruhl

    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.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    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.

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    Sarah Ruhl

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

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    Sarah Ruhl

    Smallness is subversive, because smallness can creep into smaller places and wreak transformation at the most vulnerable, cellular level. In a time when largeness is threatening to topple us, I wish to remember and praise the beauty of smallness, in order to banish the Goliath of loneliness.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    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.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    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

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    Sarah Ruhl

    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.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    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...

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    Sarah Ruhl

    When I am not paying attention to my children, they appear to desperately need it. When I am giving them my full attention, they seem just as happy to play by themselves. It is as though they need to be certain of my attention in order to play their own games and ignore me.

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    Sarah Ruhl

    When you read a novel, it seems that everything is clear, trite and understandable. But when you yourself fall in love, you understand that nobody knows anything and everyone must decide for themselves.