I know it's got kind of a weird name, but it's an incredibly inspiring book for anyone who plans to make a career out of any aspect of theater. It is out of print but not impossible to find.
It has always been my misfortune to hear and see thing that, had I not, I would have remained happier; but also I would have known less about the people I loved.
p. 17
The one year of bourgeois living had destroyed my sense of adventure and had even dented my sense of beauty.
p. 23
I have my dreams, so I am self-sufficient.
p. 28
...the artists. They're the only group that is forever thirsting for knowledge.
p. 29
Jewish people don't want to let everybody in on everything, not even their full names. Spansih people are the opposite; the more and the longer names we can display, the more we like it.
p. 43
What we mistook for simple, fun-filled, candlelit, easy gatherings during the middle of the golden summer, were actually rituals of commtments to the joy and pain of love, the black passion of angers and resentments and the indescribable excitement of creation.
p. 43
It is truly sad, that in order to hide that floating feeling of dislike, which later would harden into hatred, he let fall a curtain of affection.
p. 44
...New York. To strangers, it seems like an immense army of concrete soldiers with eyes and mouths and ears of glass. They don't move. They don't ever sit or lie down to rest. They just wait for you to come running and crack your head and heart open against their unyielding inhuman bodies.
p. 48
If I were an actor and they sent me a script asking me to play the part of Joseph, I would turn it down flat. No thank you. In the first act, he comes to his house tres fatigue and his wife tells him she's pregnant by Le Bon Dieu. I don't know how he manages to swallow that, but being a shmuck he does. End of Act One. Act Two, we find him pulling a Goddamn stubborn donkey, her sitting like a queen on it, carrying the offspring of Le Bon Dieu. In the middle of the second act he dissapears from the script. All of the family gets cannonized, even to a second cousin, and the whole third act is hers.
p. 52
It was the kind of afternoon where the sky grows dark at about three o'clock and fills you with a desire to do nothing: or to sit with a half-opened book on your lap and remember your childhood...
p. 53
If you are going into the theatre you must understand that your identity is made up of everything that you have seen or heard.
p. 63
And yet I still believe that it is sometimes the fools of the world who ultimately encourage the values that make nations adn individuals great.
p. 66
I mention it because everything that I know about direction, I have laerned from a long seiries of just such "happenings." Many of them involved people I loved. Many involved people who were to remain complete strangers to me and yet by the power of their humanity made me identify with them briefly.
p. 67
It is so easy to melt away the impossible, for it carries no future responsibility. It is a dream, from which you awaken, maybe a little sad, but nothing has been gained or lost.
p. 79
The ability to see things which aren't there is a miraculous gift. I attribute it to your Catholic upbringing.
p. 79
Breathing was the essence of life...Death is just the instant when you breathe no longer.
p. 93
When you direct, you're after that shy, inner thing hidden in the woods of your being. But it is not technique that I was ever searching for, but rather the treasure of the blind heart.
p. 94-95
The first day of rehearsal is like a trial; a trial for murder. It is dry and barren without having any of the fantasy of the trial in Alice in Wonderland
p. 109
Like everything that you really like, it didn't last very long.
p. 111
Success is a frightening thing, particularly when it sends no messenger before its arrival. Imagine that one day you are nothing and that by midnight of the same day you are famous and one of the most sought-after women in the world.
p. 117
The voices of the people you love have the miraculous way of becoming your voice.
p. 120
If you live it day by day, you hardly notice the difference, but you can never come upon the present, that sudden stanger from the past, and not have all the days of all the years that you have been away become arrows that through your tears remind you of San Sebastian.
p. 127
...beyond death or beyond fear. That is success.
p. 128
Don Abelardo was not unlike Charlie Chaplin -- that composite of the ridiculous quixotic arabesque of human actions which led him to find in a rose the unambitious loveliness of the human heart.
p. 134
Don't ever come home expecting parades.
p. 136
They are hookers, and hookers have an ancient, and unshakable past.
p. 153
Life typecasts you. It lavishes on you or it cheats you of attributes as it fits its sense of balance. After all, it has an enormous play to cast with a tremendous variety of parts, a company to be made up, costumed, and forced to perfectly perform the demands of their given role in order that the mysterious farcical meaning of the play be taken seriously.
p. 193
A soft summer evening. That sliver of time that belongs to the remebrance of love, the time for gentle hellos and gentler departures.
p. 220
Being a politician is not unlike being an actor. A politician must have an audience. He has to have a fine script which in the world they call a platform.
p. 230
Poverty teaches once but it teaches well. Once you have seen its horrible face, you don't want to look upon the likes of it again.
p. 231
Yes, the past is the present and the future, too. We try to lie out of it, but life won't let us.
p. 241
In the future, whenver you speak or think of this moment, you will always have to start the sentence or the thought with "I remember" ... and one can only remember ghosts because neither you nor I can make this moment happen again exactly as it is happening this instant...For the minutes of our lives to become ghosts they have to die first, don't they, in order for us to reclaim them as memory...Don't ever be afriad of ghosts. Ghosts are light, for death has removed from them all unnecessary weight. They have become essences and that is why you can recall them so easily and they can come to you so fast.
p. 244-245
That's what genius is...To be able to draw portraits of people you don't know and catch their face and body and soul exactly as if you had known them for a hundred years.
p. 261