It’s much easier to die with ones conflicts then to live with them.
It’s much easier to die with ones conflicts then to live with them.
Honour is a luxury reserved for those who have carriages.
But what I lived through then, I lived through by dint of habit, which is not so very different from death.
Albert Camus, Cross Purposes
I’ve been gone for a while, sorry about that, been reading a lot of novels and very few plays. Been reading Camus though so I thought I’d share this, there’s another wonderful quote that I wanted to share but it’s part of a supremely built moment that receives it’s full emotional weight through the lead up so I won’t spoil it by blogging it by itself. This quote’s pretty good as a stand-alone.
It is vital for any actor to appear on stage naked and unprepared. He must destroy and abandon his previous results and pick up new ones even if the results feel the same. This is easier for French actors then English ones who more easily accept that nothing they have done is any good.
Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,—
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men’s cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg’d up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends’ doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
‘Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.’
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.
William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus
I love Shakespeare’s villans, some of them are just so gleefully diabolical. I may have blogged this before but it’s featured in a song by one of my favourite bands so it gets stuck in my head a lot.
The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
Nothing to be done
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Quite possibly the greatest first line of any play
When women consider there own beauties, they are all alike unreasonably in their demands; for they expect their lovers should like them as long as they like themselves.
The fly that sips treacle is lost on the sweets So he that takes a woman, woman, woman, He that takes a woman, ruin meets.
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, rather than work at anything but his art.
