Eugene O'Neill

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can__ see this house. You__ never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn__ see but a few feet ahead. I didn__ meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That__ what I wanted__o be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for time.

Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid of love, I who love love?.. Why was I born without a skin, O God, that I must wear armor in order to touch or to be touched?

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.

There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.

Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.

One should either be sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.

On my solemn oath, Edmund, I'd gladly face not having an acre of land to call my own, nor a penny in the bank, I'd be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age, if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been.

There is no present or future only the past happening over and over again now.

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.

The child was diseased at birth - stricken with an hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty - the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.

Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

Now look here, Smithers. They's two kind's of stealing. They's the small kind, like what you does, and the big kind, like I does. Fo' de small stealing dey put you in jail soon or late. But fo' de big stealin' dey puts your picture in de paper and yo' statue in de Hall of Fame when you croak. If dey's one thing I learned in ten years on de Pullman cars, listenin' to de white quality talk, it's dat same fact. And when I gits a chance to use it . . . from stowaway to emperor in two years. Dat's goin' some!

Happiness hates the timid!

Because any fool knows that to work hard at something you want to accomplish is the only way to be happy. But beyond that it is entirely up to you. You__e got to do for yourself all the seeking and finding concerned with what you want to do. Anyone but yourself is useless to you there.

Why can__ you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. You__l find what you__e trying to say in him- as you__l find everything else worth saying. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep.''- 'Fine! That__ beautiful. But I wasn__ trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let__ drink up and forget it. That__ more my idea.

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.