Sean O'casey Quotes

Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.

When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.

It's I who know that well: when it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.

The whole world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.

All the world's a stage, and most of us are desperately under-rehearsed.

What time has been wasted during man's destiny in the struggle to decide what man's next world will be like! The keener the effort to find out, the less he knew about the present one he lived in. The one lovely world he knew, lived in, that gave him all he had, was, according to preacher and prelate, the one to be least in his thoughts. He was recommended, ordered, from the day of his birth to bid goodbye to it. Oh, we have had enough of the abuse of this fair earth! It is no sad truth that this should be our home. Were it but to give us simple shelter, simple clothing, simple food, adding the lily and the rose, the apple and the pear, it would be a fit home for mortal or immortal man.

He had an agent in New York, a tough red-headed woman named Phyllis Sandler who smoked Herbert Tareytons, drank Jim Beam from a paper cup, and thought the literary sun rose and set on Sean O’Casey.

Among the writers he was reading when he wrote these stories in the 1950s—and he was reading all the time, all kinds of books, dozens and dozens of them—were David Riesman, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Randall Jarrell, Sigmund Freud, Paul Goodman, William Styron, C. Wright Mills, Martin Buber, George Orwell, Suzanne Langer, F. R. Leavis, David Daiches, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Ralph Ellison, Erich Fromm, Joseph Conrad, Dylan Thomas, Sean O’Casey, e. e. cummings—who collectively represented a republic of discourse in which he aspired to

March 29: Marilyn writes to Lester Markel at the New York Times. She likes the Sunday piece on playwright Sean O’Casey. She provides her assessment of various contenders for the presidency, including Rockefeller, Humphrey, Nixon, Stevenson, William O. Douglas, and Kennedy. She considers Rockefeller “more liberal than many of the Democrats,” and declares that Stevenson “might have made it if he had been able to talk to people instead of professors.” Nixon has no soul. Douglas is ideal, but his divorce is an impediment. She is disappointed with the Times’s coverage of Castro and feels the United States should support and develop democracy. She includes some political slogans: “Nix on Nixon,” “Over the hump with Humphrey (?),” “Stymied with Symington,” “Back to Boston by Xmas—Kennedy.

I still agree with a speech Orson Welles makes toward the end of F For Fake, in which he reflects that all art, by Picasso or by Elmyr, by the anonymous masons of Chartres Cathedral or by Homer, will eventually get lost in chaos and perish in “the universal ash.” But Orson intones the eternal rebuttal in that marvelous baritone he used for his more oratorical moments: ‘What of it?’, cry the dead artists from their tombs, ‘Go on singing!’ Or, if that seems too obscure, let me quote Sean O’Casey: “Life contains tragedy, but life itself is not a tragedy.” I intend to enjoy every moment I still have left, and expend my energy in joyous creativity, even while part of me mourns those I have lost.

One minute with him is all I ask; one minute alone with him, while you’re runnin’ for th’ priest an’ th’ doctor. - Sean O’Casey, The Plow and the Stars