French dramatist (1910-1987)
One can make one's life a complete misery, worrying about burglaries and shipwrecks, but ask anyone, anyone you know ... earth-shattering disasters and fabulous inheritances all seems to take place exclusively in the newspapers.
JEAN ANOUILH
The Rehearsal
One cannot weep for the entire world. It is beyond human strength. One must choose.
JEAN ANOUILH
Cecile
It takes a certain courage and a certain greatness to be truly base.
JEAN ANOUILH
Ardele
I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life--that life that must go on, come what may. You are like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness--provided a person doesn't ask too much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl. I want to be sure of everything this very day; sure that everything will be as beautiful as when I was a little girl. If not, I want to die!
JEAN ANOUILH
Antigone
Everything ends this way in France. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, affairs of state -- everything is a pretext for a good dinner.
JEAN ANOUILH
Cecile
We have found other terms far less vague than the old ones to designate the same complaints. It's a great advance linguistically.
JEAN ANOUILH
The Waltz of the Toreadors
One can be a patriot, you know, without making one's wife join the breadline.
JEAN ANOUILH
Mademoiselle Colombe
Love is, above all else, the gift of oneself.
JEAN ANOUILH
L'homme et la mort dans l'histoire
All children are sweet at five. But at twelve they begin to get silly.
JEAN ANOUILH
Thieves' Carnival
However tight I shut my eyes, there will always be a stray dog somewhere in the world who'll stop me being happy.
JEAN ANOUILH
Restless Heart
In matters of money there's no such thing as enough.
JEAN ANOUILH
Thieves' Carnival
Poor little men, poor little cocks! As soon as they're old enough, they swell their plumage to be conquerors.... If they only knew that it's enough to be just a little bit wounded and sad in order to obtain everything without fighting for it.
JEAN ANOUILH
Cecile
Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage.
JEAN ANOUILH
Beckett
Listen to that--just listen to that. It puffs, it pants, it wheezes, it yanks its damn carcass up step by step--who'd ever believe that on stage it's a young girl.
JEAN ANOUILH
Mademoiselle Colombe
Anything may happen in this watering-place. Intrigues spring up under one's very feet like so much jungle vegetation.
JEAN ANOUILH
Thieves' Carnival
Life isn't what you think it is. It's like water, and the young let it trickle away between their fingers without even noticing. Cup your hands, keep it safe. Life eventually becomes something else, something hard, something simple, something you can hold in your hand and nibble on contentedly as you sit in the sun.
JEAN ANOUILH
Antigone
I like reality. It tastes like bread.
JEAN ANOUILH
Plays
Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.
JEAN ANOUILH
The Rehearsal
Confound it, Madam, my head is out of bounds! It's the one spot where I can have a bit of peace!
JEAN ANOUILH
The Waltz of the Toreadors
Fine-looking young chap, isn't he? Would have cut quite a dash as a dragoon but for his vocation as a virgin.
JEAN ANOUILH
The Waltz of the Toreadors