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
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
Our lives are merely strange dark interludes in the electric display of God the Father.
Life is a long drawn out lie, with a sniffling sigh at the end of it.
Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
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!
Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself.
Life is perhaps best regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings.
The only living life is in the past and future - the present is an interlude - strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness that we are living.
Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?
If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself -- ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity -- before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.
One should either be sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.
The old -- like children -- talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own!
We fought so long against small things that we became small ourselves.
Age's terms of peace, after the long interlude of war with life, have still to be concluded-Youth must keep decently away-so many old wounds may have to be unbound, and old scars pointed to with pride, to prove to ourselves we have been brave and noble.