Christopher Fry Quotes & Sayings

I've never seen a world
So festering with damnation. I have left
Rings of beer on every alehouse table
From the salt sea-coast across half a dozen counties,
But each time I thought I was on the way
To a faintly festive hiccup
The sight of the damned world sobered me up again. — Christopher Fry

I know your cause is lost, but in the heart / Of all right causes is a cause that cannot lose. — Christopher Fry

JENNET:
They also say that I bring back the past;
For instance Helen comes
Brushing the maggots from her eyes,
And, clearing here throat of the dust of several thousand years
She says "I loved ... "; but cannot any longer
Remember names. Sad Helen. Or Alexander, wearing
His imperial cobwebs and breastplate of shining worms
Wakens and looks for his glasses, to find the empire
Which he knows he put beside his bed. — Christopher Fry

Men are strange. It's almost unexpected to find they speak English. — Christopher Fry

Day's work is still to do, Whatever the day's doom. — Christopher Fry

I am very much in love with something;
What it may be I can't remember;
It will come to me.
That was a roundabout drive in the snow,
Owing to my erratic sense of direction! — Christopher Fry

We are all of us lost. The best we can do is make whatever we're lost in as much like home as we can. — Christopher Fry

An artist's sensitivity to criticism is, at least in part, an effort to keep unimpaired the zest, or confidence, or arrogance, which he needs to make creation possible; or an instinct to climb through his problems in his own way as he should, and must. — Christopher Fry

Life itself is the real and most miraculous miracle of all. If one had never before seen a human hand and were suddenly presented for the first time with this strange and wonderful thing, what a miracle, what a magnificently shocking and inexplicable and mysterious thing it would be. — Christopher Fry

In my plays I want to look at life - at the commonplace of existence-as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time. — Christopher Fry

How can we be scrupulous In a life which, from birth onwards, is so determined To wring us dry of any serenity at all? — Christopher Fry

The skirts of the gods Drag in our mud. We feel the touch And take it to be a kiss. — Christopher Fry

How can a man learn navigation Where there's no rudder? — Christopher Fry

Thank God our time is now when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere never to leave us till we take, the greatest stride of the soul man ever took. affairs are now soul size the enterprise is exploration unto God. Where are you making for? It takes so many thousand years to wake. But will you wake for pity's sake? — Christopher Fry

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement ... says heaven and earth in one word ... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. — Christopher Fry

I have always been sure
That when [the Day of Judgement] comes it will come in autumn.
Heaven, I am quite sure, wouldn't disappoint
The bulbs. — Christopher Fry

The first of our senses which we should take care never to let rust through disuse is that sixth sense, the imagination. I mean the wide-open eye which leads us to see truth more vividly, to apprehend more broadly, to concern ourselves more deeply, to be, all our life long, sensitive and awake to the powers and responsibilities given to us as human beings. — Christopher Fry

In our plain defects we already know the brotherhood of man. — Christopher Fry

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at. — Christopher Fry

How nature loves the incomplete. She knows If she drew a conclusion it would finish her. — Christopher Fry

Has made an honest woman of the supernatural. — Christopher Fry

Coffee in England is just toasted milk. — Christopher Fry

It is the individual man in his individual freedom who can mature with his warm spirit the unripe world. — Christopher Fry

What after all, is a halo? It's only one more thing to keep clean. — Christopher Fry

The inescapable dramatic situation for us all is that we have no idea what our situation is. We may be mortal. What then? We may be immortal. What then? We are plunged into an existence fantastic to the point of nightmare, and however hard we rationalize, or however firm our religious faith, however closely we dog the heels of science or wheel among the starts of mysticism, we cannot really make head or tail of it.
(And what does Fry say we do with our dilemma? The worst of all possible reactions:
We get used to it. We get broken into it so gradually we scarcely notice it.) — Christopher Fry

Imagination is the wide-open eye which leads us always to see truth more vividly. — Christopher Fry

In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment. — Christopher Fry

Where in this small-talking world can I find A longitude with no platitude? — Christopher Fry

Indulgences, not fulfillment, is what the world Permits us. — Christopher Fry

My trouble is I'm the sort of writer who only finds out what he's getting at by the time he's got to the end of it. — Christopher Fry

It's always our touches of vanity that manage to betray us. — Christopher Fry

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time. — Christopher Fry

Religion
Has made an honest woman of the supernatural,
And we won't have it kicking over the traces again. — Christopher Fry

If we could wake each morning with no memory of living before we went to sleep, we might arrive at a faultless day. — Christopher Fry

I seem to wish to have some importance
In the play of time. If not,
Then sad was my mother's pain, my breath, my bones,
My web of nerves, my wondering brain,
to be shaped and quickened with such anticipation
Only to feed the swamp of space.
What is deep, as love is deep, I'll have
Deeply. What is good, as love is good,
I'll have well. Then if time and space
Have any purpose, I shall belong to it.
If not, if all is a pretty fiction
To distract the cherubim and seraphim
Who so continually do cry, the least
I can do is to fill the curled shell of the world
With human deep-sea sound, and hold it to
The ear of God, until he has appetite
To taste our salt sorrow on his lips.
And so you see it might be better to die.
Though, on the other hand, I admit it might
Be immensely foolish. — Christopher Fry

I travel light; as light, that is, as a man can travel who will still carry his body around because of its sentimental value. — Christopher Fry

Your innocence is on at such a rakish angle it gives you quite an air of iniquity. — Christopher Fry

I must tell you I've just been reborn."
"Nicholas, you always think you can do things better than your mother. You can be sure you were born quite adequately on the first occasion. — Christopher Fry

The lines marking a penalty area are a disgrace to the playing fields of a public school. — Christopher Fry

Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith. — Christopher Fry

The dark is light enough. — Christopher Fry

The moon is nothing But a circumambulating aphrodisiac Divinely subsidized to provoke the world Into a rising birth-rate — Christopher Fry

Between our birth and death we may touch understanding, As a moth brushes a window with its wing. — Christopher Fry

We have given you a world as contradictory as a female, as cabbalistic as a male, a conscienceless hermaphrodite who plays heaven off against hell, hell off against heaven, revolving in the ballroom of the skies glittering with conflict as diamonds: we have wasted paradox and mystery on you when all you ask us for is cause and effect! — Christopher Fry

Your life, sir, is propelled
By a dream of the fear of having nightmares; your love
Is the fear of being alone; your world's history
The fear of a possible leap by a possible antagonist
Out of a possible shadow, or a not-improbable
Skeleton out of your dead-certain cupboard. — Christopher Fry

What is madness To those who only observe, is often wisdom To those to whom it happens. — Christopher Fry

We must each find our separate meaning in the persuasion of our days until we meet in the meaning of the world. — Christopher Fry

The best thing we can do is to make wherever we're lost in look as much like home as we can. — Christopher Fry

Who apart from ourselves, can see any difference between our victories and our defeats? — Christopher Fry

Equality is a mortuary word. — Christopher Fry

One day I shall burst my bud of calm and blossom into hysteria. — Christopher Fry

Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement. — Christopher Fry