Sarah Ruhl Quotes & Sayings

I think a person has to believe in something,
or search out some kind of faith;
otherwise life is empty, nothing.
How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly,
why children are born, why there are stars in the sky ...
Either you know why you live,
or it's all small, unnecessary bits. — Sarah Ruhl

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. — Sarah Ruhl

I see, in women friends, a really dangerous phenomenon where it seems they reach a certain age and become invisible. — Sarah Ruhl

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

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

Oh, where is it, where did my past go, when I was young, happy and intelligent, when my dreams and thoughts had some grace, and the present and future were lit up with hope? Why is it, that when we've just started to live, we grow dull, gray, uninteresting, lazy, useless, with flattened-out souls? — Sarah Ruhl

In America I think it's much more full of disruption culturally; it's much more mysterious how we inherit culture here. We grab it where we can find it - we're insatiable - and there can be a sense here that it's not available to you as readily as it is in other cultures. — Sarah Ruhl

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. — Sarah Ruhl

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

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. — Sarah Ruhl

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. — Sarah Ruhl

I think you have to have your own expectations of yourself and your own sense of purpose and your own intrinsic pleasure in the task. If you don't, you will drive yourself off a cliff because your fortunes will rise and fall, and if you identify too closely with that, you really will go insane. — Sarah Ruhl

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

I would like to curl up and become a small thing. About this big. And still. Very still. Have you ever become 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? — Sarah Ruhl

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. — Sarah Ruhl

When you read a novel, it seems that everything is clear, trite and understandable. But when you yourself fall in love, you understand that nobody knows anything and everyone must decide for themselves. — Sarah Ruhl

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

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

It was important to me that people know that you can make plays and raise children at the same time - for other mothers, for other parents, for other women considering having children and who want to be working and thinking and contemplating and making things while they're raising children. — Sarah Ruhl

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

What we think of as the soul is just a mingling of genetics and our parents, in my case, slowly torturing me, or in your case giving you complete unconditional love. — Sarah Ruhl

Being insulted by your child and loving them anyway is the human condition. — Sarah Ruhl

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

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

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.
If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much.
But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats.
This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.
Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing. — Sarah Ruhl

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

I would never be essentialist about sexuality and structure, but I do think there's a way in which this male-arc has been talked about as the only structure, and kind of a stand-in for even the word structure, instead of looking at other forms. — Sarah Ruhl

I have loved enough women to know how to paint.
If I had loved fewer, I would be an illustrator; if I had loved more, I would be a poet. — Sarah Ruhl

What silly little things sometimes take on meaning in life, suddenly, out of nowhere. And you know they're little nothings, and you laugh at them, but all the same, you go on feeling them, you can't stop ... — Sarah Ruhl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Play itself is a primary process, not a luxury, not a hobby, but something all children must do to survive into adulthood. — Sarah Ruhl

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. — Sarah Ruhl

I hate parties.
And a wedding is the biggest party of all.
All the guests arrived and Orpheus is taking a shower.
He's always taking a shower when the guests arrive so he doesn't have to greet them.
Then I have to greet them. — Sarah Ruhl

No one likes kids. We say we do, and we take pictures of pregnant women for People Magazine, but really they're commodities - we hate them around, we hate them on airplanes, we consider them a grand imposition and almost a style choice. — Sarah Ruhl

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

Hands are difficult. You would think they would be just five quick lines, but no, they have personalities as intimate as faces. Elizabeth's hands, for instance - they are fine hands, with long fingers that remind me of tapered candles. A person one has loved - the memory of their hands. Did they flutter or sit still? Dry? Moist? Cool on a hot forehead? What? That is what I wish to express in my paintings. The memory - of the movement - of very particular hands, even though they appear to be unmoving on canvas. — Sarah Ruhl

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. — Sarah Ruhl

Catharsis isn't a wound being excavated from childhood. — Sarah Ruhl

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. — Sarah Ruhl

A suspicion that lightness is not deeply serious (but instead whimsical) pervades aesthetic discourse. But what if lightness is a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper the intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor. — Sarah Ruhl

I think theatre is a democratic act and I think writing a play is not a democratic act. I think we should give writers more leeway and space to write the thing they want to write, and then we should produce the play, multiple times, and let them re-write it. — Sarah Ruhl

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. — Sarah Ruhl

I see it as my job to mourn him until the day I die. — Sarah Ruhl

Is this all we've got now? No priests to say yes son, your suffering meant something, no kings on the battlefield to say yes soldier, your suffering meant something. — Sarah Ruhl

Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it - I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song? — Sarah Ruhl

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. — Sarah Ruhl

This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful. — Sarah Ruhl

When I am not paying attention to my children, they appear to desperately need it. When I am giving them my full attention, they seem just as happy to play by themselves. It is as though they need to be certain of my attention in order to play their own games and ignore me. — Sarah Ruhl

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. — Sarah Ruhl

Love is unbounded by time — Sarah Ruhl

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

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

We need Harry Potter. — Sarah Ruhl

Attachment parenting is this theory that if you wear your baby around and you sleep with your baby and you breast-feed for a long time, the baby will be more attached to you. — Sarah Ruhl

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. — Sarah Ruhl

If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much.
But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats. — Sarah Ruhl

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

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

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. — Sarah Ruhl