The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape.
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There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
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Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.
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For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
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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.
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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.
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Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
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The planting of trees in the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
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Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.
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Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners -- your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards -- who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.
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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.
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It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.
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I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
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Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
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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...
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Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
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The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
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