Great Theatrical Quotes

LADY LAZARUS I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it-- A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin O my enemy. Do I terrify?-- The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day. Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade. What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand and foot-- The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies These are my hands My knees. I may be skin and bone, Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident. The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. It's easy enough to do it in a cell. It's easy enough to do it and stay put. It's the theatrical Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout: 'A miracle!' That knocks me out. There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart-- It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy. I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby That melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash, ash-- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there-- A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. -- written 23-29 October 1962

If you want more people to come to the theatre, don't put the prices at £50. You have to make theatre inclusive, and at the moment the prices are exclusive. Putting TV stars in plays just to get people in is wrong. You have to have the right people in the right parts. Stunt casting and being gimmicky does the theatre a great disservice. You have to lure people by getting them excited about a theatrical experience.

How does Parker’s body compare with yours ” Great. A pop quiz I thought recognizing his transition into lecture mode. “How does Parker’s body compare with mine Hmm.” I gave Parker a quick theatrical once-over and he smiled clearly catching on to my line of thought. “Nice legs and killer biceps. But I have better boobs. No question.

To be sure, the Bishop was a little theatrical in his humility, as he had been in his grandeur; but that was his way, Auclair reflected, and, after all, nobody can help his way. If a man admits his mistakes, that is a great deal...

No, really, Herr Nietzche, I have great admiration for you. Sympathy. You want to make us able to live with the void. Not lie ourselves into good-naturedness, trust, ordinary middling human considerations, but to question as has never been questioned before, relentlessly, with iron determination, into evil, through evil, past evil, accepting no abject comfort. The most absolute, the most piercing questions. Rejecting mankind as it is, that ordinary, practical, thieving, stinking, unilluminated, sodden rabble, not only the laboring rabble, but even worse the "educated" rabble with its books and concerts and lectures, its liberalism and its romantic theatrical "loves" and "passions"--it all deserves to die, it will die. Okay. Still, your extremists must survive. No survival, no Amor Fati. Your immoralists also eat meat. They ride the bus. They are only the most bus-sick travelers. Humankind lives mainly upon perverted ideas. Perverted, your ideas are no better than those the Christianity you condemn. Any philosopher who wants to keep his contact with mankind should pervert his own system in advance to see how it will really look a few decades after adoption. I send you greetings from this mere border of grassy temporal light, and wish you happiness, wherever you are. Yours, under the veil of Maya, M.E.H.

Are you firing him?" Her voice squeaked as if she had uttered the most outrageous profanity. Voiced the great unspoken. The mere suggestion of firing Richard Troy was the theatrical equivalent of hollering "Voldemort!" in the halls of Hogwarts.

A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will try to be an encyclopaedia of culture, and his own real personality will be lost in that false universalism.

Strangman shrugged theatrically. "It might," he repeated with great emphasis. "Let's admit that. It makes it more interesting—particularly for Kerans. 'Did I or did I not try to kill myself?' One of the few existential absolutes, far more significant than 'To be or not to be?', which merely underlines the uncertainty of the suicide, rather than the eternal ambivalence of his victim." He smiled down patronisingly at Kerans as the latter sat quietly in his chair, sipping at the drink Beatrice had brought him. "Kerans, I envy you the task of finding out—if you can.

when he was ædile, he provided such a number of gladiators, that he entertained the people with three hundred and twenty single combats, and by his great liberality and magnificence in theatrical shows, in processions, and public feastings, he threw into the shade all the attempts that had been made before him, and gained so much upon the people, that every one was eager to find out new offices and new honors for him in return for his munificence.

The earth is an orbiting speck in incomprehensible vastness. The histories of our civilizations, our accomplishments and secrets, great good and evil—these are no more significant than the single twinkle of a star. Perhaps, this is why we try to outshine the heavens with our cities and make theatrical events of our simple lives.

The pre-Socratic aphorism—ethos is the daemon—can be translated as “character is fate.” In drama, character is action. Shakespeare, too capacious for any formula, leads me to a rival aphorism: Pathos also is the daemon, which could be rendered as “personality is our destiny.” In Shakespearean theatricalism, personality is suffering. Action, Wordsworth wrote, is momentary, while suffering is permanent, obscure, dark, and shares the nature of infinity.

Girls who responded to the advertisement and then were willing to put themselves under Fong's wing, so to speak, till they could be inspected by the theatrical agent' were of a type that had no important family ties. (…) Each had a story behind her, but it was the story of the hundreds, the thousands. It was the story of a little ambition and a great hope; of immense trust and a few brains; of false pride and tragic courage. They were but units in the great mass of humanity which seem destined to struggle vainly for any realization of happiness and who go under in the backwash of the tide of living.

Whatever the sins, whatever the flirtations with unreality in the shape of maudlin theatrical shows or sycophancy toward the great, the spark of truth in him never entirely petered out (IV,

The world was in a confused turmoil-wars, H-bombs, confrontations, fear, hate, hate. And Hollywood was feeding the confusion with a steady diet of sex, violence, and lewdness. What wisdom needed, to catch up with our runaway technology, was time. And time might be bought not with violence, but with compassion-that divine unguent that lubricates and soothes our abrasive human hates. Compassion might just possibly slow down the ticking till we could defuse the world with reason. And we had an outside chance of buying a little precious extra time by filming the life of Schnozzola, the great compassionate clown. A chance that got lost among stars and their satellites. Pity Pity. Now what would I do? Certainly the world didn't need more films about sex, violence, and lewdness. Judging by contemporary Hollywood films, the United States was made up of sexpots, homosexuals, lesbians, Marquis de Sades, junkies too! too! beautiful people, country-club liberals, draft-card burners, and theatrical and religious figures bleeding make-believe blood for cause and camera. "Shock films," they called them; "skin flicks" that dealt not with the humorous, honest, robust, Rabelaisian earthiness that nurtures life, but with the cologned, pretentious, effete, adulterated crud that pollutes life.

But then, not long after, in another article, Loftus writes, "We live in a strange and precarious time that resembles at its heart the hysteria and superstitious fervor of the witch trials." She took rifle lessons and to this day keeps the firing instruction sheets and targets posted above her desk. In 1996, when Psychology Today interviewed her, she burst into tears twice within the first twenty minutes, labile, lubricated, theatrical, still whip smart, talking about the blurry boundaries between fact and fiction while she herself lived in another blurry boundary, between conviction and compulsion, passion and hyperbole. "The witch hunts," she said, but the analogy is wrong, and provides us with perhaps a more accurate window into Loftus's stretched psyche than into our own times, for the witch hunts were predicated on utter nonsense, and the abuse scandals were predicated on something all too real, which Loftus seemed to forget: Women are abused. Memories do matter. Talking to her, feeling her high-flying energy the zeal that burns up the center of her life, you have to wonder, why. You are forced to ask the very kind of question Loftus most abhors: did something bad happen to her? For she herself seems driven by dissociated demons, and so I ask. What happened to you? Turns out, a lot. (refers to Dr. Elizabeth F. Loftus)

Following the popular success of The Pickwick Papers, there was a great demand for anything ‘Pickwickian’ and soon many plagiarised reproductions and theatrical adaptations were created, aiming to cash in on the publishing phenomenon. This play, written by W. T. Moncrieff, was one of the more popular adaptations of the day.

Nevertheless, he was caught in its magic and he understood, what he had not known before, that much of the magic of a great theatrical moment is created by the audience itself, a magic impalpable but vividly present, and that what begins as trickery of lights and paint is enlarged and made fine by the response of the beholders. There are no great performances without great audiences, and this is the barrier that film and television, by their utmost efforts, cannot cross, for there can be no interaction between what is done, and those to whom it is done. Great theatre, great music-drama is created again and again on both sides of the footlights.

In a word, every man for his own ends. Our summum bonum is commodity, and the goddess we adore Dea Moneta, Queen Money, to whom we daily offer sacrifice, which steers our hearts, hands, affections, all: that most powerful goddess, by whom we are reared, depressed, elevated, esteemed the sole commandress of our actions, for which we pray, run, ride, go, come, labour, and contend as fishes do for a crumb that falleth into the water. It is not worth, virtue (that's bonum theatrale [a theatrical good]), wisdom, valour, learning, honesty, religion, or any sufficiency for which we are respected, but money, greatness, office, honour, authority; honesty is accounted folly; knavery, policy; men admired out of opinion, not as they are, but as they seem to be: such shifting, lying, cogging, plotting, counterplotting, temporizing, flattering, cozening, dissembling, "that of necessity one must highly offend God if he be conformable to the world," Cretizare cum Crete [to do at Crete as the Cretans do], "or else live in contempt, disgrace, and misery." One takes upon him temperance, holiness, another austerity, a third an affected kind of simplicity, whenas indeed he, and he, and he, and the rest are hypocrites, ambidexters, outsides, so many turning pictures, a lion on the one side, a lamb on the other.

[The eighteenth century] was the century, as we are frequently told, of women - the intellectual life of women in salons, women wielding unseen influence, women as members of academies, theatrical productions whose success depended on the power of actresses to charm; in the economic sphere, financiers amassing great fortunes in order to marry their daughters into the aristocracy, and women ruling over whole peoples and empires: Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Queen Elisabeth Farnese of Spain, as well as the likes of Mme du Pompadour and Mme du Barry. It was as if some residual matriarchy - the oldest culture of the Mediterranean - was struggling to emerge from the blood and the collective unconscious; as if the time would one day return when, in every tribe, it was the women who possessed wealth and power and the men who 'married out', moving into the wife's extended family, where they became gentle, pampered, more or less superfluous drones. [...] In the century of women, it was inevitable that these erotic legends should attach themselves to the outstanding female figures of the time [...] and all this applied even more strongly in France. It was there that women reached the greatest positions of power, and there that this erotic momentum was at its strongest, by virtue of the traditions and nature of the French people.

If Shakespeare be considered as a MAN born in a rude age and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction either from the world or from books, he may be regarded as a prodigy; if represented as a POET capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined or intelligent audience, we must abate much of this eulogy. In his compositions, we regret that many irregularities, and even absurdities, should so frequently disfigure the animated and passionated scenes intermixed with them; and, at the same time, we perhaps admire the more those beauties on account of their being surrounded by such deformities. A striking peculiarity of sentiment, adapted to a single character, he frequently hits, as it were, by inspiration; but a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold. Nervous and picturesque expressions as well as descriptions abound in him; but it is in vain we look either for purity or simplicity of diction. His total ignorance of all theatrical art and conduct, however material a defect, yet, as it affects the spectator rather than the reader, we can more easily excuse than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way only by intervals to the irradiations of genius. [....] And there may even remain a suspicion that we overrate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear more gigantic on account of their being disproportioned and misshapen.

In Dream Street there are many theatrical hotels, and rooming houses, and restaurants, and speaks, including Good Time Charley's Gingham Shoppe, and in the summer time the characters I mention sit on the stoops or lean against the railings along Dream Street, and the gab you hear sometimes sounds very dreamy indeed. In fact, it sometimes sounds very pipe-dreamy. Many actors, male and female, and especially vaudeville actors, live in the hotels and rooming houses, and vaudeville actors, both male and female, are great hands for sitting around dreaming out loud about how they will practically assassinate the public in the Palace if ever they get a chance. Furthermore, in Dream Street are always many hand-bookies and horse players, who sit on the church steps on the cool side of Dream Street in the summer and dream about big killings on the races, and there are also nearly always many fight managers, and sometimes fighters, hanging out in front of the restaurants, picking their teeth and dreaming about winning championships of the world, although up to this time no champion of the world has yet come out of Dream Street. In this street you see burlesque dolls, and hoofers, and guys who write songs, and saxophone players, and newsboys, and newspaper scribes, and taxi drivers, and blind guys, and midgets, and blondes with Pomeranian pooches, or maybe French poodles, and guys with whiskers, and night-club entertainers, and I do not know what all else. And all of these characters are interesting to look at, and some of them are very interesting to talk to, although if you listen to several I know long enough, you may get the idea that they are somewhat daffy, especially the horse players.

the foot of the downhill Eighties lay the Hudson, as dense as mercury. On the points of radio towers in New Jersey red lights like small hearts beat or tingled. In midstreet, on the benches, old people: on faces, on heads, the strong marks of decay: the big legs of women and blotted eyes of men, sunken mouths and inky nostrils. It was the normal hour for bats swooping raggedly (Ludeyville), or pieces of paper (New York) to remind Herzog of bats. An escaped balloon was fleeing like a sperm, black and quick into the orange dust of the west. He crossed the street, making a detour to avoid a fog of grilled chicken and sausage. The crowd was traipsing over the broad sidewalk. Moses took a keen interest in the uptown public, its theatrical spirit, its performers—the transvestite homosexuals painted with great originality, the wigged women, the lesbians looking so male you had to wait for them to pass and see them from behind to determine their true sex, hair dyes of every shade.

Setting down her own basket, Annabelle held a pin between her thumb and forefinger, and closed her eyes. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, she always made the same wish…to marry a peer. Strangely, however, a new thought entered her head, just as she cast the pin into the well. I wish I could fall in love. Surprised by the wilful, wayward notion, Annabelle wondered how it was that she could have wasted a wish on something that was obviously so ill-advised. Opening her eyes, Annabelle saw that the other wallflowers were staring into the well with great solemnity. “I made the wrong wish,” she said fretfully. “Can I have another?” “No,” Lillian said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Once you’ve thrown in your pin, it’s done.” “But I didn’t mean to make that particular wish,” Annabelle protested. “Something just popped into my head, and it wasn’t at all what I had planned.” “Don’t argue, Annabelle,” Evie advised. “You d-don’t want to annoy the well spirit.” “The what?” Evie smiled at her perplexed expression. “The resident spirit of the well. He’s the one to whom y-you make a petition. But if you annoy him, he may decide to demand a terrible price for granting your wish. Or he may drag you into the well with him, to live there forever as his c-consort.” Annabelle stared into the brown water. She cupped her hands around the sides of her mouth to help direct her voice. “You don’t have to grant my rotten wish,” she told the unseen spirit loudly. “I take it back!” “Don’t taunt him, Annabelle,” Daisy exclaimed. “And for heaven’s sake, step back from the edge of that well!” “Are you superstitious?” Annabelle asked with a grin. Daisy glowered at her. “There’s a reason for superstitions, you know. At some> point in time, something bad happened to someone who was standing right next to a well, just as you are.” Closing her eyes, she concentrated intently, then tossed her own pin into the water. “There. I’ve made a wish for your benefit—so there’s no need for you to complain about having wasted one.” “But how do you know what I wanted?” “The wish I made is for your own good,” Daisy informed her. Annabelle groaned theatrically. “I hate things that are for my own good.

If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as “a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents” and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developments would come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention. Meanwhile, other hopeful inventors demonstrated various sound-and-image systems—Cinematophone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope—but in every case the only really original thing about them was their name. All produced sounds that were faint or muddy, or required impossibly perfect timing on the part of the projectionist. Getting a projector and sound system to run in perfect tandem was basically impossible. Moving pictures were filmed with hand-cranked cameras, which introduced a slight variability in speed that no sound system could adjust to. Projectionists also commonly repaired damaged film by cutting out a few frames and resplicing what remained, which clearly would throw out any recording. Even perfect film sometimes skipped or momentarily stuttered in the projector. All these things confounded synchronization. De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation. One invention De Forest couldn’t make use of was his own triode detector tube, because the patents now resided with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Western Electric had been using the triode to develop public address systems for conveying speeches to large crowds or announcements to fans at baseball stadiums and the like. But in the 1920s it occurred to some forgotten engineer at the company that the triode detector could be used to project sound in theaters as well. The upshot was that in 1925 Warner Bros. bought the system from Western Electric and dubbed it Vitaphone. By the time of The Jazz Singer, it had already featured in theatrical presentations several times. Indeed, the Roxy on its opening night in March 1927 played a Vitaphone feature of songs from Carmen sung by Giovanni Martinelli. “His voice burst from the screen with splendid synchronization with the movements of his lips,” marveled the critic Mordaunt Hall in the Times. “It rang through the great theatre as if he had himself been on the stage.

In my experience, those who make the most theatrical display of demanding 'proof' of God are also those least willing to undertake the specific kinds of mental and spiritual discipline that all the great religious traditions say are required to find God. If one is left unsatisfied by the logical arguments for belief in God, and instead insists upon some 'experimental' or 'empirical' demonstration, then one ought to be willing to attempt the sort of investigations necessary to achieve any sort of real certainty regarding a reality that is nothing less than the infinite coincidence of absolute being, consciousness, and bliss. In short, one must pray: not fitfully, not simply in the manner of a suppliant seeking aid or of a penitent seeking absolution but also according to the disciplines of infused contemplation, with real constancy of will and a patient openness to grace, suffering states of both dereliction and ecstasy with the equanimity of faith, hoping but not presuming, so as to find whether the spiritual journey, when followed in earnest, can disclose its own truthfulness and conduct one into communion with a dimension of reality beyond the ontological indigence of the physical. No one is obliged to make such an effort; but, unless one does, any demands one might make for evidence of the reality of God can safely be dismissed as disingenuous, and any arguments against belief in God that one might have the temerity to make to others can safely be ignored as vacuous.

The Unknown Soldier A tale to tell in bloody rhyme, A story to last ’til the dawn of end’s time. Of a loving boy who left dear home, To bear his countries burdens; her honor to sow. –A common boy, I say, who left kith and kin, To battle der Kaiser and all that was therein. The Arsenal of Democracy was his kind, –To make the world safe–was their call and chime. Trained he thus in the far army camps, Drilled he often in the march and stamp. Laughed he did with new found friends, Lived they together for the noble end. Greyish mottled images clipp’ed and hack´ed– Black and white broke drum Ʀ…ɧ..λ..t…ʮ..m..ȿ —marching armies off to ’ttack. Images scratched, chopped, theatrical exaggerate, Confetti parades, shouts of high praise To where hell would sup and partake with all bon hope as the transport do them take Faded icons board the ship– To steel them away collaged together –joined in spirit and hip. Timeworn humanity of once what was To broker peace in eagles and doves. Mortal clay in the earth but to grapple and smite As warbirds ironed soar in heaven’s light. All called all forward to divinities’ kept date, Heroes all–all aces and fates. Paris–Used to sing and play at some cards, A common Joe everybody knew from own heart. He could have been called ‘the kid’ by the ‘old man,’ But a common private now taking orders to stand. Receiving letters from his shy sweet one, Read them over and over until they faded to none. Trained like hell with his Commander-in-Arms, –To avoid the dangers of a most bloody harm. Aye, this boy was mortal, true enough said, He could be one of thousands alive but now surely dead. How he sang and cried and ate the gruel of rations, And grumbled as soldiers do at war’s great contagions. Out–out to the battle this young did go, To become a man; the world to show. (An ocean away his mother cried so– To return her boy safe as far as the heavens go). Lay he down in trenched hole, With balls bursting overhead upon the knoll. Listened hardnfast to the “Sarge” bearing the news, —“We’re going over soon—” was all he knew. The whistle blew; up and over they went, Charging the Hun, his life to be spent (“Avoid the gas boys that’ll blister yer arse!!”). Running through wires razored and deadened trees, Fell he into a gouge to find in shelter of need (They say he bayoneted one just as he–, face to face in War’s Dance of trialed humanity). A nameless sonnuvabitch shell then did untimely RiiiiiiiP the field asunder in burrrstzʑ–and he tripped. And on the field of battle’s blood did he die, Faceless in a puddle as blurrs of ghosting men shrieked as they were fleeing by–. Perished he alone in the no man’s land, Surrounded by an army of his brother’s teeming bands . . . And a world away a mother sighed, Listened to the rain and lay down and cried. . . . Today lays the grave somber and white, Guarded decades long in both the dark and the light. Silent sentinels watch o’er and with him do walk, Speak they neither; their duty talks. Lone, stark sentries perform the unsmiling task, –Guarding this one dead–at the nation’s bequest. Cared over day and night in both rain or sun, Present changing of the guard and their duty is done (The changing of the guard ’tis poetry motioned A Nation defining itself–telling of rifles twirl-clicking under the intensest of devotions). This poem–of The Unknown, taken thus, Is rend eternal by Divinity’s Iron Trust. How he, a common soldier, gained the estate Of bearing his countries glory unto his unknown fate. Here rests in honored glory a warrior known but to God, Now rests he in peace from the conflict path he trod. He is our friend, our family, brother, our mother’s son –belongs he to us all, For he has stood in our place–heeding God’s final call.

Devon Franklin Oprah: One of the things that you say that really struck me is that if we look at our life as a movie and God as the director of our movie, then we use our faith to help propel us forward in trusting in the director, correct? Devon Franklin: Yes. Absolutely. Because what I realized is that sometimes we, in the most difficult times in our story, we begin to lose faith. Oprah: And start to think we’re in control of things. But all it takes is one wrong turn and we quickly remember that’s just not true. Here is what I love. You say: “The truth is, you and I are in control of only two things: how we prepare for what might happen, and how we respond to what just happened. The moment when things actually do happen belongs to God.” Devon: Amen. Oprah: Brilliant. Brilliant. Devon: It’s true. Because what happens is, the moments when things happen in our life, we don’t control. In a moment, life can change for the better or what in the moment may seem for the worse. So our job is to prepare. Oprah: Prepare for only two things. Devon: That’s right. Oprah: Prepare for what might happen. And then how we respond to what has happened. Devon: That’s right. Because so many times what keeps us in that valley of depression, what keeps us in that valley of frustration, is our response to a moment and not recognizing that it is exactly that. It’s a moment. It’s one scene of your movie. And what makes a great movie are scenes that are put together of great conflict. Oprah: Okay. You also say: “The key is remembering your story. The spiritual journey parallels the steps involved in bringing a movie from the initial idea to theatrical release.” Devon: Yes. Oprah: So you start with the kernel of an idea, a process known as development and production. And development begins when you have the first vision of what you can be, correct? Devon: Exactly. You can’t write a movie unless you know what the movie is supposed to be about. That’s what development is. Sometimes we get so frustrated in our lives, but we have to go back and say, “Wait a minute. Do I understand what the big idea of my life is supposed to be?” If my life is a story, then I have to know the point of my story. And sometimes what happens when we start developing a movie, the producers may have one vision of what the movie is supposed to be and the studio has another version and then the movie becomes nothing because there’s no clarity. So with our life, we have to have clarity of what we’re supposed to do. What do we believe we’re called to do in this life? And then that way it gives our whole development process more shape.

Life is a theatrical folly, a play of the great players and big dreamers set out on the biggest stage. Where improvisation dictates the mood. The contest for the lead is unabating when the cast is made up of those aiming high. Fortunately we don't all want the lead, for the dream of some is not to be the hero and face the challenges that accompany it, to maintain their prowess every day, to be ready to see off every pretender to their throne. We don't all want to be revolutionaries, we don't all want to be alone in the spotlight and have the eyes of the critical audience on us for a single minute, not feeling owed their fifteen minutes of fame. Some don't want to take to that vast stage alone and perform a monologue of Shakespearean proportions. Some recognise maybe that within leading roles, the most memorable characters, there is vulnerability and often the part is a tragic one. It is a stronger mind that recognises their part in the play of life, someone who knows that the lead part is not for them. Someone who supports the lead, wishes to journey with them and knows they will need a supporting cast. Someone who aims for contentment and lives a humble yet happy existence. The risk is for those who sets their standards too high and will never reach them. The reality is, we won't all achieve the same greatness in our lives, because our view of greatness differs between us. So on a personal level you must decide what role you wish to have, make it your own. Be the best you can by your standards, not anyone else's.

Past the bouncers outside and the girls smoking long, skinny cigarettes, past the tinted glass doors and the jade stone Novikov has put in near the entrance for good luck. Inside, Novikov opens up so anyone can see everyone in almost every corner at any moment, the same theatrical seating as in his Moscow places. But the London Novikov is so much bigger. There are three floors. One floor is “Asian,” all black walls and plates. Another floor is “Italian,” with off-white tiled floors and trees and classic paintings. Downstairs is the bar-cum-club, in the style of a library in an English country house, with wooden bookshelves and rows of hardcover books. It’s a Moscow Novikov restaurant cubed: a series of quotes, of references wrapped in a tinted window void, shorn of their original memories and meanings (but so much colder and more distant than the accessible, colorful pastiche of somewhere like Las Vegas). This had always been the style and mood in the “elite,” “VIP” places in Moscow, all along the Rublevka and in the Garden Ring, where the just-made rich exist in a great void where they can buy anything, but nothing means anything because all the old orders of meaning are gone. Here objects become unconnected to any binding force. Old Masters and English boarding schools and Fabergé eggs all floating, suspended in a culture of zero gravity.

One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys sel-revelation. A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will try to be an encyclopedia of culture, and his own real personality will be lost in that false universalism.

For another 300 years lawyers would continue to do a great deal of their writing and thinking in French, and they would supplement it with generous helpings of Latin – words like affidavit and subpoena – which conveyed an air of precision and authority unavailable to English. To this day the language of the law proves prolix, repetitious, archaic and theatrical, as indeed do many of its quite mystifying processes and practitioners.

Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying motherhood lacks meaning. There's great dignity in the smallness of motherhood; we're essential in our contingency. And though we may not follow the Western model of the epic hero, we mothers can find a metaphor for our lives. The metaphor is in the kuroko, the Kabuki theater stage assistant. You've heard of Kabuki—with its wildly theatrical actors, its gorgeous costumes, and spectacular scale. The kuroko are assistants who help the actors move through their elaborate dramas. Meant to provide unobtrusive assistance with props and costumes, kuroko try to remain in the wings. They huddle in half-kneeling posture, wearing black bags over their heads and bodies—the better to recede into both actors' and audience's preconscious mind. Scurrying to arrange the trailing hems of heavy brocade kimonos, like an American mother repeatedly straightening her daughter's wedding train, the kuroko's role is to suport the real players of life's dramas.

Life is not a theatrical monologue. Great speeches don't take anywhere if there is no action upon it. Don't confound being solidary with solitaire.

One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys self-revelation. A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will try to be an encyclopaedia of culture, and his own real personality will be lost in that false universalism. Thinking about himself will lead to trying to be the universe; trying to be the universe will lead to ceasing to be anything.

to bypass theatrical release and go directly to the home video market. Disney had enjoyed great success in recent years with direct-to-home-video releases like The Return of Jafar, a sequel to Aladdin. Because these sequels would not have the benefit of widespread theatrical distribution, they had to be made at far less cost than the original film in order to make financial sense.

He grinned and she couldn’t help but smile back. Until something bumped her hip hard enough to scoot her further into the booth. She registered the shock on Sam’s face first. He was standing to his full height with his fists clenched but held rigidly at his side. He wasn’t going to use them, just yet. Delilah had a flash thought that she admired his restraint, when she registered the voice. “Hey, Lilah, you out picking up men again?” Brandon! What was he doing here? “Brandon?” She looked at him in shock, but he only smiled at her. Somehow a real, genuine smile graced his face, and his cheeks nearly formed dimples. Sam looked back and forth between the two of them. “You know him?” She nodded. But Brandon spoke first. “Does he know what you are?” Delilah blinked. And in that moment, Brandon turned to Sam. “Did you know that she’s sixty? As in, sixty years old. She’s a witch, that’s how she keeps her looks.” “Sixty?” Sam squinched his eyes at them. “Wait—” was the only word she got out. Brandon was talking to her now. “You’re not going to deny that you’re a witch are you, baby?” “No, but—” She practically sputtered it, but sixty? Sam was giving them bizarre looks. “Delilah? Are you okay?” She didn’t get a chance to answer. Brandon smiled and waved his hand indicating her form. “Of course she’s fine. She’s amazing for twenty, let alone sixty! Her secret is that she bathes in virgin’s blood. It’s how she stays so young looking.” Sam looked a little sick to his stomach, but he clearly wondered what was going on. Thing was, Delilah didn’t have an answer for him. Brandon did. He sighed in great theatrics. “And you just would not believe how hard it is to get virgin’s blood these days.” Delilah laughed. Sam asked if she was all right and she could only get out a few words, “Thank you, Sam.” He nodded at her and pulled out a stack of bills to cover the drinks. Brandon waved him away. A look passed between the two men. Delilah could only decipher it as some weird passing of the baton, where she was the baton. Sam smiled at her as he left.

Despite the sense of invincibility and inevitability often associated with this so called Great Reset, and the Elitist Establishment that sits behind it, this theatrical movement does not strike me as an organic creation of their omnipotent genius so much as it does a premature plan that has become a reactionary course of action to counter what invariably constitutes the Great Revolution — An ongoing awakening of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world that threaten their globalist power unlike anything they or their predecessors have ever seen before.

Roosevelt, according to a story told by Hopkins, was once wheeled into Churchill’s bedroom just as the prime minister was emerging from his bath, stark naked. The president, flustered, told his attendant to back him out of the room, but Churchill theatrically declared, “The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States.

Our thinking is prey to its own weakness. But even more so, to its own grammar. It takes only a few centuries for the world to change from angels, devils and witches, to atoms and electromagnetic waves. It takes only a few grams of mushrooms for the whole of reality to dissolve before our eyes, before reorganizing itself into a surprisingly different form. It only takes the experience of spending time with a friend who has suffered a serious schizophrenic episode, a few weeks with us, struggling to communicate, to realize that delirium is a vast piece of theatrical equipment with the capacity to stage the world. And that it is difficult to find arguments to distinguish it from those great collective deliriums of ours that are the foundations of our social and spiritual life and of our understanding of the world.

In the nineteenth century another great change occurred: politicians like Napoleon consciously saw themselves as seducers, on a grand scale. These men depended on the art of seductive oratory, but they also mastered what had once been feminine strategies: staging vast spectacles, using theatrical devices, creating a charged physical presence. All this, they learned, was the essence of charisma—and remains so today. By seducing the masses they could accumulate immense power without the use of force.

Nature’s fall There was a theatrical taste to it all, The experiencing of seasons and the morbidness of the fall, When nothing seems to have any sort of animation left, As if everything and everyone is suffering from the trauma of a theft, Where they have been robbed of every lively moment and life’s pleasure, As they were busy indulging in moments of leisure, Unlike nature that only and always grows, And no signs of regression shows, But there is a sort of slight indignation in it all, And you can tell it from every pale leaf falling and tossing against the great wall, The wall that is the only barricade between life and lifelessness, The wall that prevents sensibility from the invasion of senselessness, Where leisure is a moment of enjoyment with one's self and someone you love, It can be a moment in the future or a moment you are experiencing now, But if it indulges with the present to such a degree that it invades the future, Then you are bound to exhaust beforehand life’s true treasure, That of moments of leisure offering life’s authentic pleasure, In quantities with a perfect taste and measure, Because nature too enjoys in summer complete state of leisure, But then spring is for grooming and growing, and not for pleasure, While winter and fall, are for regeneration, A self introspection and kind of inward meditation, But if it spends all seasons in leisure and soaks itself in one feeling alone, that of pleasure, Then it shall be left with no beauty’s treasure, And it shall turn into the desert, where only desert roses grow, And remind you of nature’s follies, its oversights, and its over indulgence in leisure, about which it shall never everything know, Because pleasures have no end, they are a road that has no end, That is why nature created seasons, so that it realised when it was time to bend, And not be left lonely like the desert rose, Who moans the death of beauty lost to nature’s long repose, In the lap of leisure, until it entered a state, Where it was always summer like sunny now, and from this reality it could no longer obviate, Because there was nothing left, to remind it, to end the merriments of summer time, So, it rested in prolonged slumber until the winter robbed it of all its moments sublime, And then, when summer returned and somehow the desert rose bloomed, The nature in this act of callousness was doomed, It was summer always here now, bright light everywhere, Until nature forgot of the desert rose that still bloomed somewhere, And then it all ended and the beauty got buried under the sands of time, And it became the nature’s most infamous crime, To have relied only on summer joys and thinking they will last forever, And when fall took over; the summer and the spring, now returned never!

Every morning when we gathered for Morning Class during the siege, Mr. Jeffs waved the headlines in front of the whole student body, describing what was happening to the Davidians, blow by blow. One morning I remember him being particularly theatrical. “See how the government seeks to destroy these people because of their beliefs?” he ranted, still pacing. Then he stopped and, with great dramatic flair, looked slowly over the students, holding up the paper. “Beware! Because we are next!

awkward televised hug from the new president of the United States. My curtain call worked. Until it didn’t. Still speaking in his usual stream-of-consciousness and free-association cadence, the president moved his eyes again, sweeping from left to right, toward me and my protective curtain. This time, I was not so lucky. The small eyes with the white shadows stopped on me. “Jim!” Trump exclaimed. The president called me forward. “He’s more famous than me.” Awesome. My wife Patrice has known me since I was nineteen. In the endless TV coverage of what felt to me like a thousand-yard walk across the Blue Room, back at our home she was watching TV and pointing at the screen: “That’s Jim’s ‘oh shit’ face.” Yes, it was. My inner voice was screaming: “How could he think this is a good idea? Isn’t he supposed to be the master of television? This is a complete disaster. And there is no fricking way I’m going to hug him.” The FBI and its director are not on anyone’s political team. The entire nightmare of the Clinton email investigation had been about protecting the integrity and independence of the FBI and the Department of Justice, about safeguarding the reservoir of trust and credibility. That Trump would appear to publicly thank me on his second day in office was a threat to the reservoir. Near the end of my thousand-yard walk, I extended my right hand to President Trump. This was going to be a handshake, nothing more. The president gripped my hand. Then he pulled it forward and down. There it was. He was going for the hug on national TV. I tightened the right side of my body, calling on years of side planks and dumbbell rows. He was not going to get a hug without being a whole lot stronger than he looked. He wasn’t. I thwarted the hug, but I got something worse in exchange. The president leaned in and put his mouth near my right ear. “I’m really looking forward to working with you,” he said. Unfortunately, because of the vantage point of the TV cameras, what many in the world, including my children, thought they saw was a kiss. The whole world “saw” Donald Trump kiss the man who some believed got him elected. Surely this couldn’t get any worse. President Trump made a motion as if to invite me to stand with him and the vice president and Joe Clancy. Backing away, I waved it off with a smile. “I’m not worthy,” my expression tried to say. “I’m not suicidal,” my inner voice said. Defeated and depressed, I retreated back to the far side of the room. The press was excused, and the police chiefs and directors started lining up for pictures with the president. They were very quiet. I made like I was getting in the back of the line and slipped out the side door, through the Green Room, into the hall, and down the stairs. On the way, I heard someone say the score from the Packers-Falcons game. Perfect. It is possible that I was reading too much into the usual Trump theatrics, but the episode left me worried. It was no surprise that President Trump behaved in a manner that was completely different from his predecessors—I couldn’t imagine Barack Obama or George W. Bush asking someone to come onstage like a contestant on The Price Is Right. What was distressing was what Trump symbolically seemed to be asking leaders of the law enforcement and national security agencies to do—to come forward and kiss the great man’s ring. To show their deference and loyalty. It was tremendously important that these leaders not do that—or be seen to even look like they were doing that. Trump either didn’t know that or didn’t care, though I’d spend the next several weeks quite memorably, and disastrously, trying to make this point to him and his staff.

--Birthday Star Atlas-- "Wildest dream, Miss Emily, Then the coldly dawning suspicion— Always at the loss—come day Large black birds overtaking men who sleep in ditches. A whiff of winter in the air. Sovereign blue, Blue that stands for intellectual clarity Over a street deserted except for a far off dog, A police car, a light at the vanishing point For the children to solve on the blackboard today— Blind children at the school you and I know about. Their gray nightgowns creased by the north wind; Their fingernails bitten from time immemorial. We're in a long line outside a dead letter office. We're dustmice under a conjugal bed carved with exotic fishes and monkeys. We're in a slow drifting coalbarge huddled around the television set Which has a wire coat-hanger for an antenna. A quick view (by satellite) of the polar regions Maternally tucked in for the long night. Then some sort of interference—parallel lines Like the ivory-boned needles of your grandmother knitting our fates together. All things ambigious and lovely in their ambiguity, Like the nebulae in my new star atlas— Pale ovals where the ancestral portraits have been taken down. The gods with their goatees and their faint smiles In company of their bombshell spouses, Naked and statuesque as if entering a death camp. They smile, too, stroke the Triton wrapped around the mantle clock When they are not showing the whites of their eyes in theatrical ecstasy. Nostalgias for the theological vaudeville. A false springtime cleverly painted on cardboard For the couple in the last row to sigh over While holding hands which unknown to them Flutter like bird-shaped scissors . . . Emily, the birthday atlas! I kept turning its pages awed And delighted by the size of the unimaginable; The great nowhere, the everlasting nothing— Pure and serene doggedness For the hell of it—and love, Our nightly stroll the color of silence and time.

She is the author of The Happy Kid Handbook: How to Raise Joyful Children in a Stressful World. She offers four strategies for helping your children pursue their passions.2 Know your child’s unique interests. Avoid plugging her into the local soccer program or Chinese class because that’s what all of your neighbors are doing. Watch instead (especially when she is playing) for signs of serious interests in particular pursuits. Think outside the box. Passion is not limited to playing fields and theatrical stages. It can exist in the kitchen, in the workshop, in the woods outside your back door, or in any number of other places. Parents are understandably anxious to offer enrichment to their children, but enrichment doesn’t automatically equate with large, organized programs. Nurture optimism. “Optimistic kids are more willing to take healthy risks, become better problem-solvers and experience positive relationships,” she notes. Since failure is a fact of life and your children will certainly have their share of setbacks, help them look optimistically at what they do. Avoid judgment. When you offer a negative judgment of your child’s expressed area of interest, you run the risk of stealing much of the joy from that pursuit. Not only is your child unique and different from every other child in the world, he is also unique from you. If you stomp on his potential passions or push him toward a pursuit he doesn’t particularly like, you’re likely to cause him a great deal of internal conflict.

Because blunders were a tributary of spontaneity, and without it, they would vanish like an illusion. In this respect, Actyn might have gone too far, and he might now be entering the arena where all his efforts were automatically sterile. Ever since he had decided to turn all his firepower against Dr. Aira and his Miracle Cures, he had burned through stages, unable to stop because of the very dynamic of the war, in which he was the one who took every initiative. In reality, he had overcome the first stages — those of direct confrontation, libel, defamation, and ridicule — in the blink of an eye, condemned as they were to inefficiency. Actyn had understood that he could never achieve results in those terrains. The historical reconstruction of a failure was by its very nature impossible; he ran the risk of reconstituting a success. He then moved on (but this was his initial proposition, the only one that justified him) to attempts to produce the complete scenario, to pluck one out of nothingness . . . He had no weapons besides those of performance, and he had been using them for years without respite. Dr. Aira, in the crosshairs, had gotten used to living as if he were crossing a minefield, in his case mined with the theatrical, which was constantly exploding. Fortunately they were invisible, intangible explosions, which enveloped him like air. Escaping from one trap didn’t mean anything, because his enemy was so stubborn he would set another one; one performance sprung from another; he was living in an unreal world. He could never know where his pursuer would stop, and in reality he never stopped, and at nothing. Actyn, in his eyes, was like one of those comic-book supervillains, who never pursues anything less than world domination . . . the only difference being that in this adventure it was Dr. Aira’s mental world that was at stake. But, according to the law of the circle, everything flowed into its opposite, and the lie moved in a great curve toward the truth, theater toward reality . . . The authentic, the spontaneous, were on the reverse side of these transparencies.

If you have congruence, integrity, and consistency, then know that everything is happening according to plan. Do not give up because life's events and occurrences may seem to indicate failure. Never make conclusions based on appearances. Like a theatrical production, a huge amount of activity occurs outside your view (awareness). There, if it seems your good is delayed, do not assume you have made a mistake. Press on and know that unseen forces are turning the great gears.

In common with many immature polities, great pains had been taken with the uniform of the Border Guard. They were the work of a Berlin theatrical costumier, and more than a little reminiscent of the uniforms of the Ruritanian officer classes in the Stewart Granger version of The Prisoner Of Zenda.

I think, of course, all politicians have a sense of their own image, but he had it in an unusual extent. And, when I first knew him in the '50s, when I was living in Johannesburg, I thought it was too much. I thought he had too theatrical a sense, like he was too much of a showman, and I wasn't quite sure what lay behind it. I was quite wrong, of course, because as soon as he went—before he went to jail, when he made two great speeches, it was already clear that there was a great deal behind that showmanship.

Peter Brook’s production with Laurence Olivier as Titus was one of the great theatrical experiences of the 1950s

Miss Dunlap, you see, put on quite a dramatic display after she went back to the ballroom, far more dramatic than anything that dreary production she was trying to direct could have achieved. You won’t like hearing this, but the woman actually took to the stage and told everyone the rehearsal, as well as the final production, had been canceled. Then she told everyone in the ballroom about you and Miss Plum—and that Miss Plum had been the very unattractive Miss Fremont—and that Miss Plum had obviously gone to great lengths to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes, embarrassing the good folk of Tarrytown in the process by mocking their theatrical efforts.” “Oh . . . no,” Bram said. “Indeed,” Tilda agreed. “And unfortunately, it gets worse.” “Maybe you shouldn’t tell me everything all in one sitting, Tilda,” Bram said a little weakly. “Don’t be a coward, Mr. Haverstein. It’s always best to hear all the bad instead of parceling it out bit by painful bit.” Retaking his seat, he buried his face in his hands. “Very well, carry on.” “Well, you see, Miss Dunlap was clearly distraught, as well as disappointed, that you’d been discovered kissing Miss Plum. Because of that, she said some very disparaging things about Miss Plum, and before long Mr. Skukman joined her on stage.” “Oh . . . no.” “Exactly. Well, Miss Dunlap didn’t take kindly to him arguing with her, and she . . . attacked him.” Bram lifted his head. “She . . . attacked him?” Tilda nodded. “She did, but to give Mr. Skukman credit, he didn’t bat an eye as she went about the unpleasant business of pummeling him. It wasn’t harming him at all, of course, but when she started throwing things—and not just at him but at members of your staff as well—Mr. Skukman saved quite a few people from suffering injuries by picking up Miss Dunlap, tossing her over his shoulder, and carting her offstage.” “Should I ask what happened next?” “He was run out of Tarrytown by a horde of angry townswomen, and . . . to add further chaos to the evening, someone let Geoffrey out of the barn again and he chased Miss Dunlap and Miss Cooper all the way down the drive, until they were rescued by Ernie. Although . . . he was apparently in the process of creating some new gravestones for the back graveyard in case you needed some disturbing inspiration some night, and . . . there is now a rumor swirling about town that we’re up to some concerning shenanigans here at Ravenwood.” “The

In a way, the fearful fundamentalists are right: globalism does undermine systems of absolute value and belief. But in a way they are wrong: the systems of value and belief do not immediately disappear—people simply inhabit them in a different fashion, and sometimes the old ways turn out to have a surprising amount of life left in them. The human mind has a great repertoire of ways to accept and honor social constructions of reality without swallowing them whole. Globalizing processes require us to renegotiate our relationships with familiar cultural forms, and remind us that they are things made by people: human, fallible things, subject to revision. Globalism

In Britain, it’s kind of an old-guy thing to do,” I explain as she gleefully chalks up a cue stick. “You’re kidding! We have them in all the bars where I live.” She pantomimes a big theatrical wink. “Not that I’ve been in any, of course. Here, I’ll teach you to play pool. Though ‘snooker’ is a really cool word. Snooker!” she says, and it sounds hilarious in her accent. Who’d have thought it--me and Paige. If not BFFs, we’re certainly BFTs. Best Temporary Friends. I certainly didn’t see that coming. But we’re united, at least, in refusing to withdraw into the kind of slump that both Kendra and Kelly are indulging in. It may be unfair of me, but I think it’s selfish of them. We’re all in this together, away from home, and though the group could cope with one of the four throwing a wobbly, two is unquestionably a downer. Thank goodness, Paige teaching me pool is a lot of fun, especially as she keeps showing me how guys put their arms around girls from behind to do what I call copping a feel and she calls doing a booty rub. We laugh, a lot. We laugh so much that Paige’s mobile rings four times before we hear it, and she only just answers it before it goes to voice mail. “Hey, Ev! No, I wasn’t ignoring you--Violet and I were playing pool. She calls it snooker! Isn’t that such a great word?

As pope, with his charismatic appeal and with the theatrical talent that he had retained from his youth, he brought to the Vatican what Ronald Reagan brought to the White House: a media-wise great communicator who understood how to use his charm, his athletic image and his symbolic gestures to make even the most conservative teaching or practice seem palatable.

Hitler had hypnotized large segments of the German populace with theatrical performances at rallies where he promised to make their country great again.

the Western contingent and took the two leaders captive, and then seized all who were with them. The flag was torn and stamped into the dust, the captives were imprisoned and put to torture for their boldness in daring to invade the country. In great joy this good news was carried back to the capital. Once again the Western men were routed. The Emperor praised Tzu Hsi heartily and gave her a gold coffer filled with jewels. Then he announced seven days of feasting in the nation and in the palaces special theatricals