Long Day's Journey Into Night Quotes
"The play’s true argument is that your own soul cannot be possessed, whether by possessing something or someone outside it, or by joining yourself to a transcendental possibility, to whatever version of an Emersonian Oversoul that you might prefer."
"In O’Neill’s deepest polemic, the lines are quoted by, and for, all Americans of imagination whatsoever: 'Look into my face. My name is Might-Have-Been; / I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell.'"
"He was a King of Ireland, if he had his rights, and scum was scum to him, no matter how much money it had stolen from the poor."
"The helplessness of family love to sustain, let alone heal, the wounds of marriage, of parenthood, and of sonship, have never been so remorselessly and so pathetically portrayed."
"Your eyes are beautiful, and well you know it."
"None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever."
"It's the truth! You've been the worst influence for him. He grew up admiring you as a hero! A fine example you set him!"
"All right. I did put Edmund wise to things, but not until I saw he’d started to raise hell, and knew he’d laugh at me if I tried the good advice, older brother stuff."
"I don’t understand why you should suddenly say such things. What put it in your mind this morning?"
"It’s wrong to blame your brother. He can’t help being what the past has made him."
"You ought to be proud you’re his son! He may have his faults. Who hasn’t? But he’s worked hard all his life."
"For the love of God, why couldn’t you have the strength to keep on?"
"Please believe—I tried so hard! I tried so hard!"
"It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more."
"It’s the foghorn I hate. It won’t let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back."
"Poor hands! You’d never believe it, but they were once one of my good points, along with my hair and eyes, and I had a fine figure, too."
"I haven’t touched a piano in so many years. I couldn’t play with such crippled fingers, even if I wanted to."
"It kills the pain. You go back until at last you are beyond its reach."
"It's the three Gorgons in one. You look in their faces and turn to stone. Or it's Pan. You see him and you die—that is, inside you—and have to go on living as a ghost."
"Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually."
"The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is."
"We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let's drink up and forget it."
"It's pretty horrible to see her the way she must be now."
"The hardest thing to take is the blank wall she builds around her. Or it's more like a bank of fog in which she hides and loses herself. Deliberately, that's the hell of it! You know something in her does it deliberately—to get beyond our reach, to be rid of us, to forget we're alive!"
"I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!"
"The dead part of me hopes you won’t get well. Maybe he’s even glad the game has got Mama again! He wants company, he doesn’t want to be the only corpse around the house!"
"You’re the only pal I’ve ever had. I love your guts. I’d do anything for you."
"It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!"
"For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!"
"Greater love hath no man than this, that he saveth his brother from himself."
"All the same, God damn you, I can’t help hating your guts!"
"The praise Edwin Booth gave my Othello. I made the manager put down his exact words in writing. I kept it in my wallet for years. I used to read it every once in a while until finally it made me feel so bad I didn’t want to face it any more."
"Not at you, Papa. At life. It’s so damned crazy."
"I play so badly now. I’m all out of practice. Sister Theresa will give me a dreadful scolding. She’ll tell me it isn’t fair to my father when he spends so much money for extra lessons."