100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write Quotes

“I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“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.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“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, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“Play itself is a primary process, not a luxury, not a hobby, but something all children must do to survive into adulthood.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“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.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“Don't make a wall of glass between your play and the people watching. Don't forget they were once children, who enjoyed being read to, or sung to sleep.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“I think there has never been a more misunderstood phrase than drama is conflict, conflict is drama. Instead of thinking of conflict, I like to think of dialectic, a need for opposites that undermine each other. Or, I think about the need for contrast in painting. Paintings don't need large family fights and mudslinging, but they do need contrasts of color and shade. Of course, watching people insulting other people is entertaining, as are arm wrestling, bearbaiting, and the like. But I'm not sure that it's necessary to the drama, for drama is also a spectacle, A thing of interesrt, a thing happening , an event eventing, which us not necessarily a thing fighting. Though fighting can certainly be dramatic, it is not a necessary precondition to the dramatic.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“Be suspicious of an expert who tells you to cut a seemingly unnecessary moment out of your play. The soul of your play may reside there, quietly, inconspicuously, clothing in its unnecessariness, shining forth in its lack of necessity to be.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“American actors are taught to have objectives—what does your character want from the other character? That is business. When I deal with other people, I don’t want something from them; I want a rapport. Some people say that’s an objective—it’s not—it’s a sensation of well-being. Life is not constantly about wanting to get something from somebody else. Life is about pleasure.” I hope, dear Irene, that you are in a sensation of well-being”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“And I think, as I’m surrounded by teeming life—parasites, fish, and children—I think, So, you thought you wanted to observe life? Motherhood shakes her head, clenches her fists, and demands, No, you must live it.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“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?  ”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“There was a time, when I first found out I was pregnant with twins, that I saw only a state of conflict. When I looked at theater and parenthood, I saw only war, competing loyalties, and I thought my writing life was over. 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. And then I could breathe. I could investigate the pauses. I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is also a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“The word quirky is so much more loathed than the word whimsy that it does not bear the time it would require to dissect its horrors. The choice to have a perceptible aesthetic at all is often called a quirk. The word quirky suggests that in a homogenized culture, difference has to be immediately defined, sequestered, and formally quarantined while being gently patted on the head.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“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.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“Perhaps we would have more sublime plays if we had more tolerance for and interest in imperfect plays. Because perfect plays are not sublime plays. Shakespeare's plays are weird and wonky and oddly shaped and wonderfully imperfect but sublime. They are as untidy men lime as nature is. Contemporary playwrights are often encouraged to make tidy plays rather than plays with cliffs and torrents”
― Sarah ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“Put the bad poetry in the mouths of outlandish characters. It might make bad poetry funny instead of sad.”
― Sarah ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“The importance of knowing nothing is underrated.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“Narrative is an accumulation of knowledge about the future. We begin in the present and end in the present, and in the middle is an accumulation of future possibilities”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“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.”
― sarah ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“Once the language was in the actors’ minds, and their bodies were freed from blocking, and in relationship to real architecture, they became virtuosic. Metaphor suddenly had a more intimate relationship with reality. The actor was real, the staircase was real, the emotion was real, and the language floated on top.    ”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“This was the house that Paula had taken me and two other graduate students to years earlier. She had told us to go out on the deck, look at the view of the Atlantic Ocean, and say to ourselves, This is what playwriting can buy. Now,”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“Love is unbounded by time”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“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?”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“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.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“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.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater

“We need Harry Potter.”
― Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater