Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neillwas an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The drama Long Day's Journey into Night is often numbered on the short list of the finest American plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth16 October 1888
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
Happiness hates the timid. So does science.
One should be either sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.
I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room - and God damn it - died in a hotel room.
The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty-the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.
When I was a kid I used to get fun out of my horrors.
You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.
Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
I am so far from being a pessimist...on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.
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 was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!
It's a great game - the pursuit of happiness.
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!