Quotes from Sarah Ruhl

It's this feeling that you want to love strangers, that you want to kiss the man at the post office, or the woman at the dry cleaners - you want to wrap you arms around life, life itself, but you can't and this feeling wells up in you, and there is nowhere to put this great happiness - and you're floating - and then you fall down and become unbearably sad. And you have to go lie down on the couch.

There once was a very great American surgeon named Halsted. He was married to a nurse. He loved her—immeasurably. One day Halsted noticed that his wife's hands were chapped and red when she came back from surgery. And so he invented rubber gloves. For her. It is one of the great love stories in medicine. The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love. When I met Ana, I knew: I loved her to the point of invention.

Don't make a wall of glass between your play and the people watching. Don't forget they were once children, who enjoyed being read to, or sung to sleep.

You're very comforting, I don't know why. You're like a very small casserole – has anyone ever told you that?

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.

Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing.

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

Have you ever been 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?

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

And then we jumped off Mount Olympus and flew through the clouds and you held your knee to your chest because you skinned it on a sharp cloud and then we fell into a salty lake. Then I woke up and the window frightened me and I thought: Eurydice is dead. Then I thought—who is Eurydice? Then the whole room started to float and I thought: what are people? Then my bed clothes smiled at me with a crooked green mouth and I thought: who am I? It scares me, Eurydice. Please come back.

A good joke cleans your insides out. If I don't laugh for a week, I feel dirty. I feel dirty now, like my insides are rotting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And in this day and age, we sometimes seem to care more about the record of joy than the experience of joy itself.

Listen to her the way you would listen to your own daughter if she died too young and tried to speak to you across long distances.

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

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.

She runs, trips and pitches down the stairs, holding her letter. She follows the letter down, down... Blackout. A clatter. Strange sounds—xylophones, brass bands, sounds of falling, sounds of vertigo. Sounds of breathing.

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

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.

The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.

No extra hospital words. I don't want a relationship with disease. I want to have a relationship with death. That's important. But to have a relationship with disease --that's some kind of bourgeoisie invention. And I hate it.