Quotes from Eugene O'Neill

The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us.

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

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

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 wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. [...] It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

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!

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

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

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.

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

In plain words, you've got to make up your mind to study whatever you undertake, and concentrate your mind on it, and really work at it. This isn't wisdom. Any damned fool in the world knows it's true, whether it's a question of raising horses or writing plays. You simply have to face the prospect of starting at the bottom and spending years learning how to do it.

I hate doctors! They'll do anything... to keep you coming to them. They'll sell their souls. What's worse, they'll sell yours, and you never know it till one day you find yourself in hell.

The dead! Why can't the dead die!

Mourning Becomes Electra

This is Daddy's bedtime secret for to-day: Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!

Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side. And don't be stingy, baby.

Desire Under the Elms

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

Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.

We's all poor nuts and things happen, and we yust get mixed in wrong, that's all.

For de little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin' dey makes you emperor and puts you in de Hall o' Fame when you croaks. If dey's one thing I learns in ten years on de Pullman cars listenin' to de white quality talk, it's dat same fact.

Born in a goddam hotel room and dying in a hotel room!

Dat ole davil, sea.