Eugene O'Neill Quotes

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.

The devil! what beastly things our memories insist on cherishing!

There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.

What's the use coming home to get the blues over what can't be helped.

Writing is my vacation from living.

I am so far from being a pessimist...on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.

Dey's some things I don't got to be told. I kin read them in folks' eyes.

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity - but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

We are such things as rubbish is made of, so let's drink up and forget it.

Life is perhaps best regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings.

I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame; I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame; But I know that I shall find surcease, the rest my spirit craves, Where the rainbows play in the flying spray, 'Mid the keen salt kiss of the waves.

Suppose I was to tell you that it's just beauty that's calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell which lures me, the need of freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on----in quest of the secret which is hidden over there----beyond the horizon?

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!

God gave us mouths that close and ears that don't... that should tell us something.

Why can’t you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. You’ll find what you’re trying to say in him- as you’ll find everything else worth saying. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep.'' - 'Fine! That’s beautiful. But I wasn’t trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let’s drink up and forget it. That’s more my idea.

Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?

How thick the fog is. I can't see the road. All the people in the world could pass by and I would never know. I wish it was always that way. It's getting dark already. It will soon be night, thank goodness.

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

We need above all to learn again to believe in the possibility of nobility of spirit in ourselves.

When I was a kid I used to get fun out of my horrors.

Curiosity killed the cat.

We talk about the American Dream, and want to tell the world about the American Dream, but what is that Dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things? I sometimes think that the United States for this reason is the greatest failure the world has ever seen.

Critics? I love every bone in their heads.

Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.

Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!

Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.

Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage, light it, learn about it. When you've done that you will probably know how to write a play.

We fought so long against small things that we became small ourselves.

It's a great game - the pursuit of happiness.

You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.

We are where centuries only count as seconds, and after a thousand lives, our eyes begin to open.

I spent a year in Professor Baker's famous class at Harvard. There, too, I learned some things that were useful to me-particularly what not to do. Not to take ten lines, for instance, to say something that can be said in one line.