Jean Anouilh Quotes

Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

I have no mouth, and I must scream.

I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.

All this time…ever since I sold my soul, I’ve been clinging to this idea that there is something pure and decent out there. That there was something to give me hope that even if I was a lost cause, at least there was something bright and good in the world. But there isn’t. If there was, Seth wouldn’t have fallen. Erik wouldn’t have died. Andrea Mortensen wouldn’t be dying.” -Georgina to Carter

Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

The worse that could happen has already happened to me.

It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

If you have ever been in a real tragic or sad situation, the words that come out are hopelessly inadequate and kind of cliched.

Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano!

If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.

These hands which stretch out, implore, beg, then rise to the head in a gesture of calamity.

They'll take everything, even your tears.

The cries of the sufferers on the remaining part of the wreck were heard during the night.

I want you to take away the hope because that's the thing that's killing me.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to express the tragic moment.

Life is painful, nasty and short... in my case it has only been painful and nasty.

Much melancholy has devolved upon mankind, and it is detestable to me that might will triumph in the end.

When we have lost everything, including hope, life becomes a disgrace, and death a duty.

I can feel myself dying inside.

She's not happy about the life she is living but to jump through the hoop would mean to succumb to death.

…the more miserable a man is, the more he dreads every sort of change, lest it make him more wretched still.

For a long time, I have hoped for better days, but alas, today it is necessary for me to lose all hope. My poor wife suffers more and more. I do not think it is possible to be any weaker.