Christopher Fry Quotes

jennet. Are you doing this to save me?
thomas. You natter my powers,
My sweet; you're too much a woman. But if you wish You can go down to the dinner of damnation
On my arm.
jennet. I dine elsewhere.

It's always our touches of vanity that manage to betray us.

What after all, is a halo? It's only one more thing to keep clean.

Thomas, only another Fifty years or so and then I promise to let you go.

ALIZON They told me no one was here.
RICHARD It would be me they meant.

We are all of us lost. The best we can do is make whatever we're lost in as much like home as we can.

The trees were as bright as a shower of broken glass.

Life itself is the real and most miraculous miracle of all. If one had never before seen a human hand and were suddenly presented for the first time with this strange and wonderful thing, what a miracle, what a magnificently shocking and inexplicable and mysterious thing it would be.

Coffee in England is just toasted milk.

Day's work is still to do, Whatever the day's doom.

An artist's sensitivity to criticism is, at least in part, an effort to keep unimpaired the zest, or confidence, or arrogance, which he needs to make creation possible; or an instinct to climb through his problems in his own way as he should, and must.

Indulgences, not fulfillment, is what the world Permits us.

I seem to wish to have some importance
In the play of time. If not,
Then sad was my mother's pain, my breath, my bones,
My web of nerves, my wondering brain,
to be shaped and quickened with such anticipation
Only to feed the swamp of space.
What is deep, as love is deep, I'll have
Deeply. What is good, as love is good,
I'll have well. Then if time and space
Have any purpose, I shall belong to it.
If not, if all is a pretty fiction
To distract the cherubim and seraphim
Who so continually do cry, the least
I can do is to fill the curled shell of the world
With human deep-sea sound, and hold it to
The ear of God, until he has appetite
To taste our salt sorrow on his lips.
And so you see it might be better to die.
Though, on the other hand, I admit it might
Be immensely foolish.

JENNET What can you see Out there?
THOMAS Out here? Out here is a sky so gentle Five stars are ventured on it. I can see
The sky's pale belly glowing and growing big, Soon to deliver the moon. And I can see
A glittering smear, the snail-trail of the sun
Where it crawled with its golden shell into the hills. A darkening land sunken into prayer
Lucidly in dewdrops of one syllable,
Nunc dimittis. I see twilight, madam.
JENNET But what can you hear?
THOMAS The howl of human jackals-.

Your innocence is on at such a rakish angle it gives you quite an air of iniquity.

Between our birth and death we may touch understanding, As a moth brushes a window with its wing.

The skirts of the gods Drag in our mud. We feel the touch And take it to be a kiss.

Religion
Has made an honest woman of the supernatural,
And we won't have it kicking over the traces again.

Equality is a mortuary word.

It is the individual man in his individual freedom who can mature with his warm spirit the unripe world.

We have given you a world as contradictory as a female, as cabbalistic as a male, a conscienceless hermaphrodite who plays heaven off against hell, hell off against heaven, revolving in the ballroom of the skies glittering with conflict as diamonds: we have wasted paradox and mystery on you when all you ask us for is cause and effect!

Imagination is the wide-open eye which leads us always to see truth more vividly.

Madam, if I were Herod in the middle Of the massacre of the innocents, I'd pause
Just to consider the confusion of your imagery.

How nature loves the incomplete. She knows If she drew a conclusion it would finish her.

I've only one small silver night to spend
So show me no luxuries. It will be enough
If you spare me a spider, and when it spins I'll see The six days of Creation in a web
And a fly caught on the seventh. And if the dew Should rise in the web, I may well die a Christian.

Men are strange. It's almost unexpected to find they speak English.

I know your cause is lost, but in the heart / Of all right causes is a cause that cannot lose.

The moon is nothing But a circumambulating aphrodisiac Divinely subsidized to provoke the world Into a rising birth-rate

JENNET:
They also say that I bring back the past;
For instance Helen comes
Brushing the maggots from her eyes,
And, clearing here throat of the dust of several thousand years
She says "I loved ... "; but cannot any longer
Remember names. Sad Helen. Or Alexander, wearing
His imperial cobwebs and breastplate of shining worms
Wakens and looks for his glasses, to find the empire
Which he knows he put beside his bed.

I am very much in love with something;
What it may be I can't remember;
It will come to me.
That was a roundabout drive in the snow,
Owing to my erratic sense of direction!

I have always been sure
That when [the Day of Judgement] comes it will come in autumn.
Heaven, I am quite sure, wouldn't disappoint
The bulbs.

Thank God our time is now when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere never to leave us till we take, the greatest stride of the soul man ever took. affairs are now soul size the enterprise is exploration unto God. Where are you making for? It takes so many thousand years to wake. But will you wake for pity's sake?

In our plain defects we already know the brotherhood of man.

Has made an honest woman of the supernatural.

Do you want our spirits to hobble out of their graves Enduring twinges of hopeless human affection
As long as death shall last? Still to suffer
Pain in the amputated limb! To feel
Passion in vacuo! That is the sort of thing
That causes sun-spots, and the lord knows what Infirmities in the firmament.

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.

I've never seen a world
So festering with damnation. I have left
Rings of beer on every alehouse table
From the salt sea-coast across half a dozen counties,
But each time I thought I was on the way
To a faintly festive hiccup
The sight of the damned world sobered me up again.