The most horrible thing is not a government that stages public executions, but a government that secretly disposes of its victims.
Characterization in a play is like a blank check which the dramatist accords to the actor for him to fill in.
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
I'd give a hundred dollars for a cold beer.
The time for speaking seldom arrives, the time for being never departs.
My father's rich, my momma's good looking. Right? And I can play the Blues. I've never suffered and don't intend to suffer.
Tomorrow or the next life - which comes first, we never know.