Sarah Ruhl Quotes

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.

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

Art is a way of freezing time, or extending time. ... It's another way to bridge the gaps between us.

Have you ever been 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?

Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.

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.

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.

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

What I really value about being a writer is that I can go to rehearsal when I want to, and then, when I need to be at home writing or with my kids, I go home.

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

A multivalent culture is an amazing place to be writing theatre.

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.

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

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

It's a privilege to have kids and not live your life in solitude. But we live in a child-hating culture.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.