Quotes from Christopher Fry

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

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.

The moon is nothing but a circumambulating aphrodisiac divinely subsidized to provoke the world into a rising birth-rate.

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

Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair a narrow escape into faith.

ReligionHas made an honest woman of the supernatural.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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!

ALIZON They told me no one was here. RICHARD It would be me they meant.

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

Am I supposed to be merely exercising my tongue Or am I being listened to?

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.

The trees were as bright as a shower of broken glass.

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.

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.

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.

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