Top 40 Sarah Ruhl Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day.”

— Sarah Ruhl

2. “Theatre is, at its roots, some very brave people mutually consenting to a make believe world, with nothing but language to rest on.”

— Sarah Ruhl

3. “No, you’re not. If you were really sorry, you wouldn’t have done it. We do as we please, and then say we’re sorry. But we’re not sorry. We’re just uncomfortable – watching other people in pain.”

— Sarah Ruhl

4. “This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.”

— Sarah Ruhl

5. “There’s a word in Japanese for being sad in the springtime – a whole word for just being sad – about how pretty the flowers are and how soon they’re going to die.”

— Sarah Ruhl

6. “I think maybe heaven is a sea of untranslatable jokes. Only everyone is laughing.”

— Sarah Ruhl

7. “Smallness is subversive, because smallness can creep into smaller places and wreak transformation at the most vulnerable, cellular level. In a time when largeness is threatening to topple us, I wish to remember and praise the beauty of smallness, in order to banish the Goliath of loneliness.”

— Sarah Ruhl

8. “Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.”

— Sarah Ruhl

9. “The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.”

— Sarah Ruhl

10. “It’s this feeling that you want to love strangers, that you want to kiss the man at the post office, or the woman at the dry cleaners – you want to wrap you arms around life, life itself, but you can’t and this feeling wells up in you, and there is nowhere to put this great happiness – and you’re floating – and then you fall down and become unbearably sad. And you have to go lie down on the couch.”

— Sarah Ruhl

11. “Have you ever been so melancholy, that you wanted to fit in the palm of your beloved’s hand? And lie there, for fortnights, or decades, or the length of time between stars? In complete silence?”

— Sarah Ruhl

12. “I think theatre is a democratic act and I think writing a play is not a democratic act. I think we should give writers more leeway and space to write the thing they want to write, and then we should produce the play, multiple times, and let them re-write it.”

— Sarah Ruhl

13. “Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it – I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song?”

— Sarah Ruhl

14. “It’s a privilege to have kids and not live your life in solitude. But we live in a child-hating culture.”

— Sarah Ruhl

15. “I would never be essentialist about sexuality and structure, but I do think there’s a way in which this male-arc has been talked about as the only structure, and kind of a stand-in for even the word structure, instead of looking at other forms.”

— Sarah Ruhl

16. “And then we jumped off Mount Olympus and flew through the clouds and you held your knee to your chest because you skinned it on a sharp cloud and then we fell into a salty lake. Then I woke up and the window frightened me and I thought: Eurydice is dead. Then I thought – who is Eurydice? Then the whole room started to float and I thought: what are people? Then my bed clothes smiled at me with a crooked green mouth and I thought: who am I? It scares me, Eurydice. Please come back.”

— Sarah Ruhl

17. “I used to paint and I used to draw, and I probably would have loved to have been a portrait painter if I’d been good enough, but I really wasn’t good enough.”

— Sarah Ruhl

18. “Being dead is the most airtight defense of one’s own aesthetic.”

— Sarah Ruhl

19. “Plays are architecture, and you can make them stand in many ways that are hard to describe. And, I think, in our limited ability to describe them, we’ve substituted our inarticulateness for saying that there’s one and only one structure.”

— Sarah Ruhl

20. “I see, in women friends, a really dangerous phenomenon where it seems they reach a certain age and become invisible.”

— Sarah Ruhl

21. “You’re very comforting, I don’t know why. You’re like a very small casserole – has anyone ever told you that?”

— Sarah Ruhl

22. “I see it as my job to mourn him until the day I die.”

— Sarah Ruhl

23. “In America I think it’s much more full of disruption culturally; it’s much more mysterious how we inherit culture here. We grab it where we can find it – we’re insatiable – and there can be a sense here that it’s not available to you as readily as it is in other cultures.”

— Sarah Ruhl

24. “Do you not think, Mrs. Givings, that snow is always kind? Because it has to fall slowly, to meet the ground slowly, or the eyelash slowly – And things that meet each other slowly are kind.”

— Sarah Ruhl

25. “No one likes kids. We say we do, and we take pictures of pregnant women for People Magazine, but really they’re commodities – we hate them around, we hate them on airplanes, we consider them a grand imposition and almost a style choice.”

— Sarah Ruhl

26. “Small, forthright words, used in the service of condensing experience, might have an idea buried in them as large as the most expansive work that wears its intellectualism on its sleeve. The unshed tears of the deeply felt are akin to the unused large words in the service of a thought.”

— Sarah Ruhl

27. “I always thought there would be more interesting people at my wedding.”

— Sarah Ruhl

28. “It was important to me that people know that you can make plays and raise children at the same time – for other mothers, for other parents, for other women considering having children and who want to be working and thinking and contemplating and making things while they’re raising children.”

— Sarah Ruhl

29. “We all exist in relation to the world, our partners, the human race.”

— Sarah Ruhl

30. “I would like to curl up and become a small thing. About this big. And still. Very still. Have you ever become so melancholy, that you wanted to fit in the palm of your beloved’s hand? And lie there, for fortnights, or decades, or the length of time between stars? In complete silence?”

— Sarah Ruhl

31. “The word quirky is so much more loathed than the word whimsy that it does not bear the time it would require to dissect its horrors. The choice to have a perceptible aesthetic at all is often called a quirk. The word quirky suggests that in a homogenized culture, difference has to be immediately defined, sequestered, and formally quarantined while being gently patted on the head.”

— Sarah Ruhl

32. “Attachment parenting is this theory that if you wear your baby around and you sleep with your baby and you breast-feed for a long time, the baby will be more attached to you.”

— Sarah Ruhl

33. “A multivalent culture is an amazing place to be writing theatre.”

— Sarah Ruhl

34. “I think you have to have your own expectations of yourself and your own sense of purpose and your own intrinsic pleasure in the task. If you don’t, you will drive yourself off a cliff because your fortunes will rise and fall, and if you identify too closely with that, you really will go insane.”

— Sarah Ruhl

35. “We need Harry Potter.”

— Sarah Ruhl

36. “I do think there’s a relationship between a book and a reader that’s more intimate, in many ways, than the relationship between an audience member and a play – just by the nature of it being an object that you can have in bed with you and that you can keep and page through.”

— Sarah Ruhl

37. “Sitting down with younger women writers and saying, “This is what I do and you can do this” is hugely important.”

— Sarah Ruhl

38. “What I really value about being a writer is that I can go to rehearsal when I want to, and then, when I need to be at home writing or with my kids, I go home.”

— Sarah Ruhl

39. “Every day as I wave to my children when I drop them off at school, or let one of them have a new experience – like crossing the street without holding my hand – I experience the struggle between love and non-attachment. It is hard to bear – the extreme love of one’s child and the thought that ultimately the child belongs to the world. There is this horrible design flaw – children are supposed to grow up and away from you; and one of you will die first.”

— Sarah Ruhl

40. “I don’t read a word that’s written about me. I don’t read my own interviews. I don’t read reviews. I think it would drive me insane.”

— Sarah Ruhl

41. “Play itself is a primary process, not a luxury, not a hobby, but something all children must do to survive into adulthood.”

— Sarah Ruhl

42. “American actors are taught to have objectives – what does your character want from the other character? That is business. When I deal with other people, I don’t want something from them; I want a rapport. Some people say that’s an objective – it’s not – it’s a sensation of well-being. Life is not constantly about wanting to get something from somebody else. Life is about pleasure.” I hope, dear Irene, that you are in a sensation of well-being.”

— Sarah Ruhl

43. “Shame is an odd emotion. It clings to things over which we have no control, like a scent.”

— Sarah Ruhl

44. “What a happiness it would be to cry.”

— Sarah Ruhl

45. “Be suspicious of an expert who tells you to cut a seemingly unnecessary moment out of your play. The soul of your play may reside there, quietly, inconspicuously, clothing in its unnecessariness, shining forth in its lack of necessity to be.”

— Sarah Ruhl

46. “That is why they have poets – to classify all the degrees of love. It is for scientists to classify the maladies arising from the want of it.”

— Sarah Ruhl

47. “Don’t make a wall of glass between your play and the people watching. Don’t forget they were once children, who enjoyed being read to, or sung to sleep.”

— Sarah Ruhl

48. “And in this day and age, we sometimes seem to care more about the record of joy than the experience of joy itself.”

— Sarah Ruhl