Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. I... - Sarah Ruhl - Quotes.Pub

Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing.

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Sarah Ruhl Quotes

I don’t read a word that’s written about me. I don’t read my own interviews. I don’t read reviews. I think it would drive me insane.

Every day as I wave to my children when I drop them off at school, or let one of them have a new experience – like crossing the street without holding my hand – I experience the struggle between love and non-attachment. It is hard to bear – the extreme love of one’s child and the thought that ultimately the child belongs to the world. There is this horrible design flaw – children are supposed to grow up and away from you; and one of you will die first.

Sitting down with younger women writers and saying, “This is what I do and you can do this” is hugely important.

I do think there’s a relationship between a book and a reader that’s more intimate, in many ways, than the relationship between an audience member and a play – just by the nature of it being an object that you can have in bed with you and that you can keep and page through.

It was important to me that people know that you can make plays and raise children at the same time – for other mothers, for other parents, for other women considering having children and who want to be working and thinking and contemplating and making things while they’re raising children.

I think you have to have your own expectations of yourself and your own sense of purpose and your own intrinsic pleasure in the task. If you don’t, you will drive yourself off a cliff because your fortunes will rise and fall, and if you identify too closely with that, you really will go insane.

Plays are architecture, and you can make them stand in many ways that are hard to describe. And, I think, in our limited ability to describe them, we’ve substituted our inarticulateness for saying that there’s one and only one structure.

I think theatre is a democratic act and I think writing a play is not a democratic act. I think we should give writers more leeway and space to write the thing they want to write, and then we should produce the play, multiple times, and let them re-write it.

And then we jumped off Mount Olympus and flew through the clouds and you held your knee to your chest because you skinned it on a sharp cloud and then we fell into a salty lake. Then I woke up and the window frightened me and I thought: Eurydice is dead. Then I thought – who is Eurydice? Then the whole room started to float and I thought: what are people? Then my bed clothes smiled at me with a crooked green mouth and I thought: who am I? It scares me, Eurydice. Please come back.

What I really value about being a writer is that I can go to rehearsal when I want to, and then, when I need to be at home writing or with my kids, I go home.

You’re very comforting, I don’t know why. You’re like a very small casserole – has anyone ever told you that?

We all exist in relation to the world, our partners, the human race.

No one likes kids. We say we do, and we take pictures of pregnant women for People Magazine, but really they’re commodities – we hate them around, we hate them on airplanes, we consider them a grand imposition and almost a style choice.

Attachment parenting is this theory that if you wear your baby around and you sleep with your baby and you breast-feed for a long time, the baby will be more attached to you.

A multivalent culture is an amazing place to be writing theatre.

Do you not think, Mrs. Givings, that snow is always kind? Because it has to fall slowly, to meet the ground slowly, or the eyelash slowly – And things that meet each other slowly are kind.

I see, in women friends, a really dangerous phenomenon where it seems they reach a certain age and become invisible.

It’s a privilege to have kids and not live your life in solitude. But we live in a child-hating culture.

Being dead is the most airtight defense of one’s own aesthetic.

In America I think it’s much more full of disruption culturally; it’s much more mysterious how we inherit culture here. We grab it where we can find it – we’re insatiable – and there can be a sense here that it’s not available to you as readily as it is in other cultures.

Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it – I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song?

It’s this feeling that you want to love strangers, that you want to kiss the man at the post office, or the woman at the dry cleaners – you want to wrap you arms around life, life itself, but you can’t and this feeling wells up in you, and there is nowhere to put this great happiness – and you’re floating – and then you fall down and become unbearably sad. And you have to go lie down on the couch.

I used to paint and I used to draw, and I probably would have loved to have been a portrait painter if I’d been good enough, but I really wasn’t good enough.

I would never be essentialist about sexuality and structure, but I do think there’s a way in which this male-arc has been talked about as the only structure, and kind of a stand-in for even the word structure, instead of looking at other forms.

Have you ever been so melancholy, that you wanted to fit in the palm of your beloved’s hand? And lie there, for fortnights, or decades, or the length of time between stars? In complete silence?

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