“Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes:-alright. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills-like a god. It is the Ordinary made beautiful: it is also the Average made lethal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his priest. My tools are very delicate. My compassion is honest. I have honestly assisted children in this room. I have talked away terrors and relieved many agonies. But also-beyond question-I have cut from the parts of individuality repugnant to this god, in both his aspects. Parts sacred to rarer and more wonderful gods. And at what length...Sacrifices to Zeus took at the most, surely, sixty seconds each. Sacrifices to the Normal can take as long as sixty months.”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! ... My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost!”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“Look... to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!'...”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“You have your words, and I have mine.”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that.
I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make to world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist.”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there. I can't see it, because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle. I can't jump because the bit forbids it, and my own basic force - my horsepower, if you like - is too little.”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out.”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“In an ultimate sense I cannot know what I do in this place - yet I do ultimate things. Essentially I cannot know what I do - yet I do essential things. Irreversible, terminal things. I stand in the dark with a pick in my hand, striking at heads! I need - more desperately than my children need me - a way of seeing in the dark.”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“Look, life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods... spirits of certain trees, of certain curves of brick walls, of certain fish and chip shops if you like. And slate roofs, and frowns in people, and slouches... I'd say to them, "Worship all you can see, and more will appear...”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“What did I expect of him? Very little, I promise you. One more dented little face. One more adolescent freak. The usual unusual. One great thing about being in the adjustment business: you're never short of customers.”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“Do you know what it's like for two people to live in the same house as if they were in different parts of the world?”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“The Devil isn’t made by what Mommy says, or what Daddy says. The Devil is there.”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“I'll give him the good Normal world where we're tethered beside them - blinking our nights away in a non-stop drench of cathode-ray over our shrivelling heads!”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs - it sucks - it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles.”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods.”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“He knows no physics or engineering to make the world real to him… no paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it… no music except television jingles… no history except tales from a desperate mother… no friends to give him a joke or make him know himself more moderately. He’s a modern citizen for whom society doesn’t exist.”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“Look...to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say "That's enough!"... He's done that. All right, he's sick. He's full of misery and fear. He was dangerous, and could be again, though I doubt it. But that boy has know a passion more ferocious that I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you something: I envy it. Don't you see? That's the accusation! That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time. "At least I galloped! When did you?”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“I use that word endlessly: "primitive." "Oh, the primitive world," I say. "What instinctive truths were lost with it!" And while I sit there, baiting a poor, unimaginative woman with the word that freaky boy tries to conjure the reality! I sit looking at pages of centaurs trampling the soil of Argos - and outside my window he is trying to become one, in a Hampshire field! ... I watch that woman knitting, night after night - a woman I haven't kissed in six years - and he stands in the dark for an hour, sucking the sweat of his God's hairy cheek! Then in the morning, I put away my books on the cultural shelf, close up the Kodachrome snaps of Mount Olympus, touch my reproduction statue of Dionysus for luck - and go off to hospital to treat him for insanity. Do you see?”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“To go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
“Look ... to go through life and call it yours -- your life -- you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!”
― Peter Shaffer, quote from Equus
Peter Shaffer
Born place: in Liverpool, England, The United Kingdom
Born date May 15, 1926
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“Small steps could make large journeys, if admittedly very slow ones.”
― Kim Harrison, quote from Ever After
“They had stopped shouting at each other and put their faith in legal counsel. With the result that how things could be made to look was what counted, not how they actually were.”
― William Maxwell, quote from So Long, See You Tomorrow
“Dear Anyone: This is a letter from one anyone to another anyone, no names required, because nobody really knows anyway. Names don't make a hell of a lot of difference. The world is made up entirely of strangers. Millions and millions of them. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else. Sometimes we think we know other people, especially those we supposedly are close to, but if we really knew them, why are we so often surprised by the shit they do? Like, parents are always surprised by what their kids will do. They raise them from the time they are babies, spend each and every day with them, think they're these goddamn fucking angels, and then one day the cops come to the door and say hey, guess what parents? Your kid just bashed some other kid's head in with a baseball bat. Or you're the kid, and you think things are pretty fucking OK, and then one day this guy who's supposed to be your dad says so long, have a nice life. And you think, what the fuck is this? So years later, your mom ends up living with another guy, and he seems OK, but you think, when's it coming? That's what life is. Life is always asking yourself, when's it coming? Because if it hasn't come for a long time, you know you're fucking due. All the best, Anyone.”
― Linwood Barclay, quote from No Time for Goodbye
“But what is the philosophy of this generation? Not God is dead, that point was passed long ago. Perhaps it should be stated Death is God. This generation thinks – and this is its thought of thoughts – that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power. Death waits for these things as a cement floor waits for a dropping light bulb. The brittle shell of glass loses its tiny vacuum with a burst, and that is that. And this is how we teach metaphysics on each other. "You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead. Can you pity them, feel for them? You can nothing! There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love as soft men think.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Herzog
“...she refused to leave anything to someone else that she could do better herself.”
― Michelle Moran, quote from Cleopatra's Daughter
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