Sarah Ruhl Quotes

Play itself is a primary process, not a luxury, not a hobby, but something all children must do to survive into adulthood.

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.

There are jokes about breast surgeons.
You know-- something like-- I've seen more breasts in this city than--
I don't know the punch line.
There must be a punch line.

I'm not a man who falls in love easily. I've been faithful to my
wife. We fell in love when we were twenty-two. We had plans. There
was justice in the world. There was justice in love. If a person was
good enough, an equally good person would fall in love with that
person. And then I met-- Ana. Justice had nothing to do with it.

There once was a very great American surgeon named Halsted. He was
married to a nurse. He loved her-- immeasurably. One day Halsted
noticed that his wife's hands were chapped and red when she came back
from surgery. And so he invented rubber gloves. For her. It is
one of the great love stories in medicine. The difference between
inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.

When I met Ana, I knew:
I loved her to the point of invention.

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.

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.

I see it as my job to mourn him until the day I die.

The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.

Then she said, "Your plays balance on air I mean they are air I mean they are performed in air so they are air. "If a whole city could balance on a seed then a city could balance on a play because a play is air and everything is air. "Your next play should be about a seed because a seed is smaller than an almond. Or maybe your next play should be smaller than an almond, about nothing, about air.

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.

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?

When you snatch happiness in little bits, fits and starts, and lose it, like me, you become coarse, little by little, you become hateful.

Titles by their nature imply that the play's architecture is like a bull's-eye (and some are) with the point being in the center. Sometimes the point is in the margins, or in the experience of throwing the dart.

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.

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.

You're very comforting, I don't know why. You're like a very small casserole – has anyone ever told you that?

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

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."

Ruhl, Sarah. 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater (p. 103). Faber & Faber. Kindle Edition.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Can the theater teach us to wait? To forestall our satisfaction? Poems teach us how to wait. The natural world makes us wait. Erik Satie teaches us how to wait. And so does much music. Will YouTube teach us how to wait? Will YouTube teach us how to die?

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

Catharsis isn't a wound being excavated from childhood.

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

I think maybe heaven is a sea of untranslatable jokes. Only everyone is laughing.

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.

Is this all we've got now? No priests to say yes son, your suffering meant something, no kings on the battlefield to say yes soldier, your suffering meant something.

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.

Small, forthright words, used in the service of condensing experience, might have an idea buried in them as large as the most expansive work that wears its intellectualism on its sleeve. The unshed tears of the deeply felt are akin to the unused large words in the service of a thought.

A suspicion that lightness is not deeply serious (but instead whimsical) pervades aesthetic discourse. But what if lightness is a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper the intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor.

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.

Do you not think, Mrs. Givings, that snow is always kind? Because it has to fall slowly, to meet the ground slowly, or the eyelash slowly - And things that meet each other slowly are kind.

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

Love is unbounded by time

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.

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

Hands are difficult. You would think they would be just five quick lines, but no, they have personalities as intimate as faces. Elizabeth's hands, for instance - they are fine hands, with long fingers that remind me of tapered candles. A person one has loved - the memory of their hands. Did they flutter or sit still? Dry? Moist? Cool on a hot forehead? What? That is what I wish to express in my paintings. The memory - of the movement - of very particular hands, even though they appear to be unmoving on canvas.

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.

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.

She has a quiet paroxysm.
Now remember that these are the days
before digital pornography.
There is no cliché of how women are supposed to orgasm,
no idea in their heads of how they are supposed to sound when they climax.
Mrs. Daldry's first orgasms could be very quiet,
organic, awkward, primal. Or very clinical. Or embarrassingly natural.
But whatever it is, it should not be a cliché, a camp version
of how we expect all women sound when they orgasm.
It is simply clear that she has had some kind of release.

What we think of as the soul is just a mingling of genetics and our parents, in my case, slowly torturing me, or in your case giving you complete unconditional love.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

It's this feeling that you want to love strangers, that you want to kiss the man at the post office, or the woman at the dry cleaners - you want to wrap you arms around life, life itself, but you can't and this feeling wells up in you, and there is nowhere to put this great happiness - and you're floating - and then you fall down and become unbearably sad. And you have to go lie down on the couch.

If the proper audience for poetry is God, then the proper audience for the novel is people. Plays have both stories and poetry. Therefore the proper audience for plays is: people and God. But: what is the audience for poetry in a godless universe? The audience for poetry in a godless universe is the academy. Or perhaps: other poets and therefore God? And what is the proper audience for plays in a godless universe? Is there no proper audience for plays in a godless universe? Must we invent our own gods?

There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me (truly you have not lived until you have changed one baby's diaper while another baby quietly vomits on your shin) and finally I came to the thought: all right, then, annihilate me, that other self was a fiction anyhow.

Certain brands of guilt can be inculcated in a secular way but other brands of guilt can only be obtained with reference to the metaphysical.

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.