SRSarah Ruhl

28 collected words

Sarah Ruhl

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

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.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

02Undated

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.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

03Undated

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.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

04Undated

Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

05Undated

When I am not paying attention to my children, they appear to desperately need it. When I am giving them my full attention, they seem just as happy to play by themselves. It is as though they need to be certain of my attention in order to play their own games and ignore me.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

06Undated

Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it—I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song?

Sarah Ruhl / quote

07Undated

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.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

08Undated

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.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

09Undated

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.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

10Undated

Smallness is subversive, because smallness can creep into smaller places and wreak transformation at the most vulnerable, cellular level. In a time when largeness is threatening to topple us, I wish to remember and praise the beauty of smallness, in order to banish the Goliath of loneliness.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

11Undated

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.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

12Undated

Motherhood is a predicament. How to live fully inside of it with any grace?

Sarah Ruhl / quote

13Undated

I wonder how it is that we are all connected despite our tremendous differences.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

14Undated

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.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

15Undated

I would like to curl up and become a small thing. About this big. And still. Very still. Have you ever become so melancholy, that you wanted to fit in the palm of your beloved’s hand? And lie there, for fortnights, or decades, or the length of time between stars? In complete silence?

Sarah Ruhl / quote

16Undated

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.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

17Undated

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.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

18Undated

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?

Sarah Ruhl / quote

19Undated

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...

Sarah Ruhl / quote

20Undated

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.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

21Undated

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

Sarah Ruhl / quote

22Undated

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.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

23Undated

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.

Sarah Ruhl / quote

24Undated

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

Sarah Ruhl / quote