M.L. Rio Quotes

He'd never been in my house and I was self-conscious, embarrassed by it. I was painfully aware of the fact that we didn't have enough books.

How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else's words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding?

Actors are by nature volatile - alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.

So what do you do? Ignore your grief, or indulge it?

The things about Shakespeare is, he's so eloquent...he speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.

I seemed doomed to always play supporting roles in someone else's story. Far too many times I had asked myself whether art was imitating life or if it was the other way around.

You know, you scare the hell out of me [...] I don't know, it's like, I look at you and suddenly the sonnets make sense.

Nothing makes sense to him either. His whole world is falling apart, and once he realizes he can't stop it or fix it or change it, there's only one thing left to do." My eyes adjusted slowly, maddeningly. "What's that?" His shadow shrugged in the gloom. "Absolve yourself. Blame it on fate.

Nothing is so exhausting as anguish.

But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart - by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.

For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.

James laughed brokenly, and I felt something deep between my lungs crack clean in two.

I felt her sigh, and when she breathed her sadness out, I breathed it in.

You were real to me. Sometimes I thought you were the only real thing.

Hatred is the sincerest form of flattery.

This," James said, when he had disappeared. "This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune - often the surfeit of our own behavior - we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars … as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting-on!

My martyrdom is not the selfless kind. I can't look at Filippa, shamed by all the injuries I've inflicted- like a man with a bomb strapped to his chest, ready to blow himself up without a thought for the collateral damage.

We're only ever playing fifty percent of a character. The rest is us, and we're afraid to show people who we really are. We're afraid of looking foolish if we reveal the full force of our emotions.

One thing I'm sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food - lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt this before.

We were always surrounded by books and words and poetry, all the fierce passions of the world bound in leather and vellum. (I blame this in part for what happened.)