Historical Play Quotes

...here I am Antony: Yet cannot hold this visible shape... - Antony and Cleopatra ~ William Shakespeare

You can tell whether a person plays well or not by the way he carries the instrument, whether it means something to him or not. ~ Miles Davis

What kind of role do you play after someone like Stringer, you know what I mean? You play another gangster. What's the point of that? I've played the gangster. I try to keep it really varied; it just makes for more of a fun and interesting career. ~ Idris Elba

People who believe in fundamental and irreversible changes in human nature are themselves ahistorical and naive. If novelists know anything it's that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world - and most recently in America - the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along. ~ Zadie Smith

And then, when I wouldn't give in, he wouldn't talk to me. I still wouldn't play. ~ Ally Condie

The Staging

In the weeks after my mother's death, I sleep
Four or five hours a night, often interrupted
By dreams, and take two or three naps a day.

It seems like enough. I can survive if I keep
This sleep schedule as it has been constructed
For me. But if it seems my reflexes are delayed,

Or if I sway when I walk, or weep or do not weep,
Please don't worry. I'm not under destruction.
My grief has cast me in a lethargic cabaret.

So pay the cover charge and take your seat.
This mourning has become a relentless production
And I've got seventy-eight roles to play. ~ Sherman Alexie

God likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside of God, he has no one but himself to play with! But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.

Now when God plays "hide" and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself! But that's the whole fun of it-just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But- when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will WAKE UP, stop pretending, and REMEMBER that we are all one single Self- the God who is all that there is and who lives forever and ever.
You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the ~ Alan W. Watts

I am blessed and honored with the opportunity I have to come play for the San Diego Chargers now. ~ Darius Philon

Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence ... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play. ~ Jean Cocteau

Like all things in life and games that we play, there simply has to come a time when it has to end. ~ R.J. Torbert

I brought you something. It's my sister's coat. It
gets cold in Nashville in the wintertime. ~ Nancy B. Brewer

If we look too closely at many historical figures, we won't like what we see. ~ Roxane Gay

If you have ever met someone who rarely reads, then you will understand the blank look Moti gave me. For nonreaders, life is simply what they touch and see, not what they feel when they open the pages of a play and are transported to the Forest of Arden or Illyria. Where the world is full of a thousand colors for those who love books, I suspect it is simply black and gray to everyone else. A tree is a tree to them; it is never a magical doorway to another world populated with beings that don't exist here. ~ Michelle Moran

What people most need now is to apply their conversion skills to those things that are essential for their survival. They need to convert facts into logic, free will into purpose, conscience into decision. They need to convert historical experience into a design for a sane world. ~ Norman Cousins

We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent or self-satisfied; they are, if sound, the spearhead of progress. If they are fundamentally wrong, free discussion will in time put an end to them. ~ Abraham Flexner

My mum is from Ghana, and she used to play highlife music in the house, and my dad used to listen to music. ~ Fleur East

It is clear that both at home and abroad producers have been unwilling to trust their fortunes entirely to the unrestricted play of competition. Both in world and domestic markets businessmen have sought security by substituting collective controls for the free play of market forces. ~ George W. Stocking

If a leaf fell from a tree, I'd stop juggling and play with the leaf. I went to my prop bag and got a little bandage and stuck the leaf back on the tree. People loved it. ~ Philippe Petit

It's good to be able to be a leading lady, to be a romantic lead, to play opposite people who are talented, and charismatic and stuff. ~ Heather Graham

Play in curiosity is where everything happens. ~ Andrew Zuckerman

It's a pleasure to play my sister because everything I've accused her of my whole life, I can now re-enact before her eyes. ~ Chelsea Handler

I went to play golf and tried to shoot my age, but I shot my weight instead. ~ Bob Hope

I'm like a middle-aged person; when my friends go on about modern bands, I don't know what they are talking about. I'm into rock n' roll, like Jimi Hendrix. Not so much because of my parents, who used to play a lot of Nina Simone and older blues, but my brother and sister. ~ Georgia May Jagger

One of the most important times in my life was the first time that I remember seeing my daddy get onstage and play music with a bunch of guys. All of them playing something different at the same time and all becoming one, and me soaking that in at 5 years old and going, 'That's my daddy up there, and he's a part of something.' ~ Randy Houser

The Imagi-Nation is a little country in your head. When you're young, you go there to play. When you get older, you go there to worry. ~ John Bytheway

And once, or twice, to throw the dice is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin in the secret house of shame ~ Oscar Wilde

I've decided I don't want to play any more games treating human beings as objects. It's kind of sordid when you think about it, when you think it over. ~ Morrie Ryskind

BODY

Only when the body becomes a temple does it play the role for the right cause. ~ Sirshree

This was football played at the speed of ice hockey and the ball was in play for only 53 minutes of the 90. The Premiership at its highest level is enthralling, edge-of-the-seat stuff, but sometimes it is too fast and frenetic for its own good. ~ Daniel Taylor

The notion of displacement destabilizes spatial hierarchies of senders and receivers, and turns the issue of historical causality into one or more negotiable genealogy and interpretative communities. ~ Charlotte Bydler

SHAKESPEARE

What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more

(Hamlet)

There is no one kind of Shakespearean hero, although in many ways Hamlet is the epitome of the Renaissance tragic hero, who reaches his perfection only to die. In Shakespeare's early plays, his heroes are mainly historical figures, kings of England, as he traces some of the historical background to the nation's glory. But character and motive are more vital to his work than praise for the dynasty, and Shakespeare's range expands considerably during the 1590s, as he and his company became the stars of London theatre. Although he never went to university, as Marlowe and Kyd had done, Shakespeare had a wider range of reference and allusion, theme and content than any of his contemporaries. His plays, written for performance rather than publication, were not only highly successful as entertainment, they were also at the cutting edge of the debate on a great many of the moral and philosophical issues of the time.

Shakespeare's earliest concern was with kingship and history, with how 'this sceptr'd isle' came to its present glory. As his career progressed, the horizons of the world widened, and his explorations encompassed the geography of the human soul, just as the voyages of such travellers as Richard Hakluyt, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir Francis Drake expanded the horizons of the real world. ~ Ronald Carter

It's like making a sandwich. I start with the bread and the meat. That's the architecture. Add some cheese, lettuce and tomato. That's character development and polishing. Then, the fun part. All the little historical details and the slang and the humor is the mayonnaise. I go back and slather that shit everywhere. The mayo is the best part. I'm a bit messy with the mayo. ~ Laini Giles

I just stopped liking basketball. And then you dribbling down the court and having the owner like cuss at you and call you an idiot. I didnt even look forward to coming to the games, and if the owner [Donald Sterling] came to the game, I definitely was not gonna have a good game because it was just like, how do you play when the main heckler in the gym is the owner of the team, and hes telling you how much he hates you and calling out your name? ~ Baron Davis

I think the first thing that you need to detach yourself from is numbers, because music has now splintered off into so many different forms of media, MTV doesn't play videos, the radio is now competing with the Internet. ~ Adam Levine

I'm the girl who's like, 'Why wear heels when I can wear tennis shoes and be comfortable?' I've always been the girl who's like, 'Let's go play basketball.' ~ Kyla Pratt

Michael Freeman was thirty-five years old – a former Special Forces soldier turned policeman. He was a tall and slim black man, with grey-flecked hair and dark almond-shaped eyes. His smile was tight-lipped – half knowing and half strategic. It hid a mouthful of craggy teeth. A childhood in Detroit's East Side with an aggressive, alcoholic father had taught him to play things close to his chest, to look and listen. His colleagues knew him as a patient thinker, sedulous, missing nothing given time. Intellectually savvy and emotionally guarded, he exuded certitude. In Afghanistan, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he spent several weeks as a mounted outlier with the Northern Alliance in the Alma Tak Mountains, beyond the range of reinforcement or rescue – drinking filtered ditchwater and eating nuts scavenged from corpses – and calling down massive airstrikes on Taliban positions. He gained a certain reputation. Word spread the length of the Darya Suf River valley, through the Tiangi Gap to the stronghold at Mazar-i-Sharif that there was a monster loose in the mountains and the Taliban called him 'bor-buka', which seemed to mean black or devil or whirlwind, and, at times, all of these things. ~ Simon Conway

At the root of all power and motion, there is music and rhythm, the play of patterned frequencies against the matrix of time. We know that every particle in the physical universe takes its characteristics from the pitch and pattern and overtones of its particular frequencies, its singing. Before we make music, music makes us. ~ Joachim-Ernst Berendt