- Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
- Marriage is the price men pay for sex; sex is the price women pay for marriage.
- The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
- Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
- We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
- I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
- Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
- I hold that we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
- Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.
- Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense.
- The most valuable thing I inherited was a temperament that does not revolt against Necessity and that is constantly renewed in Hope.
- I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for - whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.
- Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
- Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.
- The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape.
- Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?
- The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous... and the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight.
- The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, "Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home." And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.
- I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.
- Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
- Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
- On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being.
- Winning children, who appear so guileless, are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.
- We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.
- The theater is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are." Yet most dramatists employ it to say: "This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action."
- The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
- A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference and a longer view and finds them incongruous. It dampens enthusiasm; it mocks hope. It pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation.
- A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
- "Our Town" is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village or as a speculation about the condition of life after death. It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our life.
- My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
- Imagination draws on memory. Memory and imagination combined can stage a Servants' Ball or even write a book, if that's what they want to do.
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