Quotes from Eugene O'Neill

One should either be sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.

It is Mystery - the mystery any one man or woman can feel but not understand as the meaning of any event - or accident - in any life on earth.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The Grace of God is glue.

I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room - and God damn it - died in a hotel room.

One should be either sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.

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

The sea hates a coward.

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

Happiness hates the timid. So does science.

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

The only living life is in the past and future - the present is an interlude - strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness that we are living.

The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!

He thinks money spent on a home is money wasted. He's lived too much in hotels. Never the best hotels, of course. Second-rate hotels. He doesn't understand a home. He doesn't feel at home in it. And yet, he wants a home. He's even proud of having this shabby place. He loves it here.

Any fool knows that to work hard at something you want to accomplish is the only way to be happy.

EDMUND: It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull 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 always be a little in love with death!

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.

The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.

You're two of a kind, and a bad kind.

God damn you, stop shoving your rotten soul in my lap!

You can't be too careful about work. It's the most dangerous habit known to medical science.

But land is land, and it's safer than the stocks and bonds of Wall Street swindlers.

Writing is my vacation from living