Quotes about Theater

Once in every generation, if we’re lucky, a character shows up who can teach us about reality because he’s more real than ourselves. Melville called such a character a “Drummond light” after the type of light once used in theaters that was capable of providing illumination in many directions. May one of us create such a character. Better yet, let’s buck tradition and create a string of Drummond lights, each a brilliant facet of the Hope Diamond that is our new fiction. Let’s turn away, once and for all, from old Enlightenment tropes toward a new narrative of Enwritenment. Together let’s write light.

Life is better with a little drama in it.
                                    ~ Scott Nilsson

Life is better with a little drama in it.  ~ Scott Nilsson

I grew up in a world that regarded authenticity as something deep within one's soul-- governed by one's conscience and measured against one's true nature. A question of being true to oneself. Of avoiding artifice. Kuranko do not fetishize the ego as we do, but emphasize a person's social nous. As such, authenticity is consummated in the way one realizes one's given destiny or plays one's social role. The name of the game is not self-knowledge, but knowing one's place and making the most of it. Fot this reason implies theatricality implies something very different from acting out. rather than spontaneously giving vent to one's feelings, one learns to perform the gestures and emotions appropriate to one's role.

If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience.

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.

On resentment at his forced retirement from the stage after he was fired by Britain's National Theater, My stage successes have provided me with the greatest moments outside myself, my film successes the best moments, professionally, within myself.

On resentment at his forced retirement from the stage after he was fired by Britain's National Theater, I should be soaring away with my head tilted slightly toward the gods, feeding on the caviar of Shakespeare.... An actor must act.

My only regret in the theater is that I could never sit out front and watch me.

I used to think she was quite intelligent, in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not. It tooks me years to find out. . . .

It happened that a few weeks later Her aunt was off to the theater To see that interesting play The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.

Good teaching is one-forth preparation and three-fourths theater.

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.

But men must know, that in this theater of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

No more important duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions.

What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.

You cannot be buried in obscurity: you are exposed upon a grand theater to the view of the world. If your actions are upright and benevolent, be assured they will augment your power and happiness.

Whatever is done without ostentation, and without the people being witnesses of it, is, in my opinion, most praiseworthy: not that the public eye should be entirely avoided, for good actions desire to be placed in the light; but notwithstanding this, the greatest theater for virtue is conscience.

Now I am not joining in the hue and cry again the dramatist's picturization or against the arts of our time. This theme [evil] often makes very good theater, but what makes good theater does not necessarily make for a good life. I think Macbeth is great, but I am not eager to be the Macbeths' house guest.

This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.

It seems to me that the thing that makes the theater worthwhile is the fact that it attracts so many people with ideas who are constantly trying to share them with the public. Real art is illumination. It gives a man an idea he never had before or lights up ideas that were formless or only lurking in the shadows of his mind. It adds stature to life.

Everybody has his own theater, in which he is manager, actor, prompter, playwrite, sceneshifter, boxkeeper, doorkeeper, all in one, and audience into the bargain.

To watch an American on a beach or crowding into a subway, or buying a theater ticket, or sitting at home with his radio on, tells you something about one aspect of the American character: the capacity to withstand a great deal of outside interference, so to speak; a willing acceptance of frenzy which though it's never self-conscious, amounts o a willingness to let other people have and assert their own lively, and even offensive, character. They are a tough race in this.

Here's Abraham Lincoln's incredible journey to become the sixteenth president of the United States of America! 1809 - Born February 12 in a log cabin in the backwoods of Hardin County (now Larue County), Kentucky 1816 - He worked to support his family after they were forced out of their home. 1818 - His mother, Nancy Hanks, died. 1831 - Failed in business. 1832 - Defeated for Illinois House of Representatives. 1832 - Lost his job, couldn't get into law school, worked odd jobs. 1832 - Chosen captain of company of volunteers which did not see battle in the Black Hawk War. 1833 - Grocery business failed. Declared bankruptcy, yet paid off the money he borrowed from friends to start his business. 1834 - Elected to Illinois state legislature and served four successive terms (until 1841). 1836 - Obtained license as an attorney. 1837 - Became law partner in Springfield, Illinois, with John T. Stuart. 1838 - Defeated in becoming speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives. 1840 - Defeated in becoming elector. 1842 - Married Mary Todd on Nov. 4. They had four sons. 1843 - Defeated for US House of Representatives. 1847 - Served one term in US House of Representatives as a Whig. 1849 - Defeated for US House of Representatives. 1849 - Rejected for the position of Commissioner of the General Land Office. 1849 - Retired from politics. 1855 - Defeated for US Senate as a Whig. 1855 - Became a Republican. 1856 - Considered for vice-president (got less than 100 votes in convention). 1858 - Nominated as the Republican candidate for US Senator from Illinois. 1858 - Challenged Stephen A. Douglas. The seven debates became famous. 1858 - Defeated for US Senate as a Republican, he had made his mark. 1860 - Selected as the Republican candidate for president. 1860 - Elected president of the United States with a minority of the popular vote. 1861 - Inaugurated March 4. 1861 - Seven states had seceded by the time of his inauguration. 1861 - On April 12, Fort Sumter was fired upon and the Civil War had begun. 1863 - Issued Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1. 1864 - Elected to second term as president by a great majority. 1865 - On April 9, Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant signed the terms of Confederate Surrender. 1865 - On April 14, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while attending a performance at Ford's Theater in Washington, DC. He died the next morning.