92 Quotes by Sarah Ruhl

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

Plays are architecture, and you can make them stand in many ways that are hard to describe. And, I think, in our limited ability to describe them, we’ve substituted our inarticulateness for saying that there’s one and only one structure.

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.

I do think there’s a relationship between a book and a reader that’s more intimate, in many ways, than the relationship between an audience member and a play – just by the nature of it being an object that you can have in bed with you and that you can keep and page through.

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.

We need Harry Potter.

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.

And then we jumped off Mount Olympus and flew through the clouds and you held your knee to your chest because you skinned it on a sharp cloud and then we fell into a salty lake. Then I woke up and the window frightened me and I thought: Eurydice is dead. Then I thought – who is Eurydice? Then the whole room started to float and I thought: what are people? Then my bed clothes smiled at me with a crooked green mouth and I thought: who am I? It scares me, Eurydice. Please come back.

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.