Jean Anouilh
Jean Anouilh
Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilhwas a French dramatist whose career spanned five decades. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1943 play Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles' classical drama, that was seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's Vichy government. One of France's most prolific writers after World War II, much of Anouilh's work deals with themes of maintaining integrity in a world of moral compromise...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth23 June 1910
CountryFrance
Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.
Life isn't what you think it is. It's like water, and the young let it trickle away between their fingers without even noticing. Cup your hands, keep it safe. Life eventually becomes something else, something hard, something simple, something you can hold in your hand and nibble on contentedly as you sit in the sun.
Life consists of nothing more than the happiness we can get out of it.
To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death.
Life is a child playing round your feet, a tool you hold firmly in your grip, a bench you sit down upon in the evening, in your garden.
What you get free costs too much.
Our entire life - consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.
Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy /common clay, if you like /eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others /the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes.
Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy --common clay, if you like --eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others --the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes.
What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating
When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past . . . And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.
Beauty is one of the rare things which does not lead to doubt of God.
All evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.
Every man thinks god is on his side.