12 Terence Rattigan Quotes

Terence Rattigan quotes

1. Kenneth: If you're so hot, you'd better tell me how to say she has ideas above her station. Brian: Oh, yes, I forgot. It's fairly easy, old boy. Elle a des idees au-dessus de sa gare.

2. When you're between any kind of devil and the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea sometimes looks very inviting.

3. Let us invent a character, a nice respectable, middle-class, middle-aged, maiden lady, with time on her hands and the money to help her pass it. She enjoys pictures, books, music, and the theatre and though to none of these arts (or rather, for consistency's sake, to none of these three arts and the one craft) does she bring much knowledge or discernment, at least, as she is apt to tell her cronies, she 'does know what she likes'. Let us call her Aunt Edna.

4. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.

5. Do you know what le vice Anglais - the English vice - really is? Not flagellation, not pederasty - whatever the French believe it to be. It's our refusal to admit to our emotions. We think they demean us, I suppose.

1. I will not insult you by trying to tell you that one day you will forget. I know as well as you that you will not. But, at least, in time you will not remember as fiercely as you do now - and I pray that that time may be soon.

2. Will this new play be good or bad? Nothing else matters. Nothing at all.

3. It has been said that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but many it not be truer to say that to be absolutely powerful a man must first corrupt himself?

4. To face life without hope can mean to live without despair.

5. “But the world is a dark enough place for even a little flicker to be welcome.”

6. “To love with one’s eyes open sometimes makes life very difficult.”

7. “To see yourself as the world sees you may be very brave, but it can also be very foolish.”