Quotes from Christopher Fry

If only inflicted pain could be as contagious As a plague, you might use it more sparingly.

Mother, I make it known publicly: I'm tired of my little brother. Will you please Give him to some charity?

God bless you, in case you sneeze.

A good old custom. Always fornicate Between clean sheets and spit on a well-scrubbed floor.

If you had such a secret, I And all my fiendish flock, my incubi, Succubi, imps and cacodemons, would have leapt Out of our bath of brimming brimstone, crying Eureka, cherchez, la femme!—Emperors Would be colonizing you, their mistresses Patronizing you, ministers of state Governmentalizing you. And you Would be eulogized, lionized, probably Canonized for your divine mishap.

It really is Beyond the limit of respectable superstition To confuse my voice with a peacock's.

If you're afraid of your shadow falling across Another life, shine less brightly upon yourself.

I defend myself against pain and death by pain And death,

You may be decay and a platitude Of flesh, but I have no other such memory of life.

Importunate life. It should have something better to do Than to hang about at a chronic street-corner In dirty weather and worse company.

In the past I wanted to be hung. It was worth while being hung to be a hero, seeing that life was not really worth living.

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

I would as soon be up there, walking in the moon's white unmolared gums. I'll sit on the world and rotate with you till we roll into the morning.

She has never learnt to yawn And so she hasn't the smallest comprehension Of those who can.

Dear boy, I only want to be hanged. What possible objection can he have to that?

How do you know that out there, in the day or night According to latitude, the entire world Isn't wanting to be hanged? Now you, for instance, Still damp from your cocoon, you're desperate To fly into any noose of the sun that should dangle Down from the sky. Life, forbye, is the way We fatten for the Michaelmas of our own particular Gallows.

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

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

Equality is a mortuary word.

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.