Top 80 Eugene O'Neill Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Your father goes out. He meets his friends in barrooms or at the Club. You and Jamie have the boys you know. You go out. But I’m alone. I’ve always been alone.”

— Eugene O'Neill

52. “While you are still beautiful and life still woos, it is such a fine gesture of disdainful pride to jilt it.”

— Eugene O'Neill

53. “No dog is as well bred or as well mannered or as distinguished and handsome.”

— Eugene O'Neill

54. “You’ll say to yourself, I’m just an old man who is scared of life, but even more scared of dying. So I’m keeping drunk and hanging on to life at any price, and what of it?”

— Eugene O'Neill

55. “Age’s terms of peace, after the long interlude of war with life, have still to be concluded-Youth must keep decently away-so many old wounds may have to be unbound, and old scars pointed to with pride, to prove to ourselves we have been brave and noble.”

— Eugene O'Neill

56. “It is Mystery – the mystery any one man or woman can feel but not understand as the meaning of any event – or accident – in any life on earth...”

— Eugene O'Neill

57. “I’m thinking ’tis only slaves do be giving heed to the day that’s gone or the day to come.”

— Eugene O'Neill

58. “You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.”

— Eugene O'Neill

59. “Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage, light it, learn about it. When you’ve done that you will probably know how to write a play.”

— Eugene O'Neill

60. “On my solemn oath, Edmund, I’d gladly face not having an acre of land to call my own, nor a penny in the bank, I’d be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age, if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been.”

— Eugene O'Neill

61. “The trouble with you, I think, is you are still too dependent on others. You expect too much from outside you and demand too little of yourself. You hope everything will be made smooth and easy for you by someone else. Well, it’s coming to the point where you are old enough, and have been around enough, to see that this will get you exactly nowhere. You will be what you make yourself and you have got to do that job absolutely alone and on your own, whether you’re in school or holding down a job.”

— Eugene O'Neill

62. “Oh, I’m so sick and tired of pretending this is a home! You won’t help me! You won’t put yourself out the least bit! You don’t know how to act in a home! You don’t really want one! You never wanted one – never since the day we were married! You should have remained a bachelor and lived in second-rate hotels and entertained your friends in barrooms!”

— Eugene O'Neill

63. “Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for time.”

— Eugene O'Neill

64. “Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.”

— Eugene O'Neill

65. “You’re lying to yourself again. You wanted to get rid of them. Their contempt and disgust aren’t pleasant company. You’re glad they’re gone.”

— Eugene O'Neill

66. “There was no damned romance in our poverty.”

— Eugene O'Neill

67. “Well, you wanted me to be a hero in blue, so you better be resigned! Murdering doesn’t improve one’s manners!”

— Eugene O'Neill

68. “The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty-the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.”

— Eugene O'Neill

69. “One may not give one’s soul to a devil of hate – and remain forever scatheless.”

— Eugene O'Neill

70. “It makes it so much harder, living in this atmosphere of constant suspicion, knowing everyone is spying on me, and none of you believe in me, or trust me.”

— Eugene O'Neill

71. “What’s the use coming home to get the blues over what can’t be helped.”

— Eugene O'Neill

72. “The devil! what beastly things our memories insist on cherishing!”

— Eugene O'Neill

73. “The old – like children – talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one’s beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one’s secrets are one’s own!”

— Eugene O'Neill

74. “Stay passed out, that’s the right dope. There ain’t any cool willow trees- except you grow your own in a bottle.”

— Eugene O'Neill

75. “Dey’s some things I don’t got to be told. I kin read them in folks’ eyes.”

— Eugene O'Neill

76. “No, I’m afraid I’m like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn’t even got the makings. He’s got only the habit.”

— Eugene O'Neill

77. “Well, they say a good cry does you a lot of good.”

— Eugene O'Neill

78. “A game of secret, cunning stratagems, in which only the fools who are fated to lose reveal their true aims or motives – even to themselves.”

— Eugene O'Neill

79. “When I was a kid I used to get fun out of my horrors.”

— Eugene O'Neill

80. “I discovered early in life that living frightened me when I was sober.”

— Eugene O'Neill

81. “Soon, leedle proletarians, ve vill have free picnic in the cool shade, ve vill eat hot dogs and trink free beer beneath the villow trees! Like hogs, yes! Like beautiful leedle hogs!”

— Eugene O'Neill

82. “That’s right! Run him down! Run down everybody! Everyone is a fake to you!”

— Eugene O'Neill

83. “I’ll be waiting to welcome you with that “my old pal” stuff, and give you the glad hand, and at the first good chance I get stab you in the back.”

— Eugene O'Neill

84. “Now I have to lie, especially to myself. But how can you understand, when I don’t myself. I’ve never understood anything about it, except that one day long ago I found I could no longer call my soul my own.”

— Eugene O'Neill

85. “Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?”

— Eugene O'Neill

86. “Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together.”

— Eugene O'Neill

87. “I’m sorry I remembered out loud.”

— Eugene O'Neill

88. “Love never has reasons, and neither does lack of love. They are all miracles.”

— Eugene O'Neill